Advertising And Gloria Steinem's Sex, Lies, And Advertising

In Gloria Steinem’s “Sex, Lies, and Advertising” Steinem explains how sex and lies are the basis for so many advertisements in popular magazines and other cultural stages including technology shows and car buying. Advertisements are “media-wide influences” are a continual theme throughout the writing of Steinem (201). Steinem’s magazine eventually did not take ads due to the fact Steinem could not find ads that did not degrade women (201). Steinem believed that ads were sexist and did not positively support women (202). After the stalemate companies began to partner with Ms. Magazine such as JVC and IBM (206). Although some companies such as those in the tobacco industry want only

It is no secret that today’s society defines beauty as thin, long-legged women with statuesque bodies. Examples are found everywhere just by glancing at the closest magazine ads or by scrolling down the latest fashion article online. Normal, everyday women are being forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the “Top-Model”-like women currently crowding up Hollywood. Media depicts women as an unattainable image. They pressure ladies to buy the products they’re advertising; luring them with false advertisements promising that with it, they too could be perfect. While the media portrays women in a certain way for advertising and marketing benefits, it has caused numerous negatives effects to women’s self-esteems nationwide, it contradicts

In “The Fashion Industry: Free to be an Individual” by Hannah Berry, Hannah emphasizes how social media especially advertisements pressure females to use certain product to in order to be considered beautiful. She also acknowledges the current effort of advertisement today to more realistically depicts of women. In addition, these advertisements use the modern women look to advertise products to increase women self-esteem and to encourage women to be comfortable with one’s image.

The claim presented in the article is how ads often set unrealistic beauty standards, and how the author encourages them to “break free” from these standards by giving two examples on how ads should be compelled.

In Jean Kilbourne’s essay, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence, she paints a picture of repression, abuse, and objectification of women. Kilbourne gives an eye-opening view to the way American advertisers portray women and girls. Throughout the essay she has images that depict women in compromising poses. These images are examples of how often we see women in dehumanizing positions in advertisements and how desensitized we have become. Kilbourne implores us to take the media more seriously. She is putting a microscope on society and showing that the objectification of women is acceptable.

In “Two Ways a Woman Can get Hurt: Advertising and Violence,” the author Jean Kilbourne describes how advertising and violence is a big problem for women. Although her piece is a little scrambled, she tries to organize it with different types of advertisement. Women are seen as sex objects when it comes to advertising name brand products. Corporate representatives justify selling and marketing for a product by how a woman looks. Kilbourne explains how the media is a big influence on how men perceive women. Kilbourne tries to prove her point by bashing on advertising agencies and their motives to successfully sell a product. Kilbourne’s affirmation towards advertisements leaves you no doubt that she is against them.

In our society today a business is not a business without an advertisement. These advertisements advertise what American’s want and desire in their lives. According to Jack Solomon in his essay, “Master’s of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” Jack Solomon claims: “Because ours is a highly diverse, pluralistic society, various advertisements may say different things depending on their intended audiences, but in every case they say something about America, about the status of our hopes, fears, desires, and beliefs”(Solomon). Advertisers continue to promote the American dream of what a women’s body should look like. They advertise their products in hopes for consumers to buy them, so they can look like the models pictures in the ads. Behind these ads, advertisers tend to picture flawless unrealistic woman with the help of Photoshop. In our society today to look like a model is an American dream and can be the reasons why we fantasizes and buy these products being advertised. “America’s consumer economy runs on desire, and advertising stokes the engines by transforming common objects;signs of all things that Americans covet most”(Solomon).

Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly surrounded by advertisements. On average, we are exposed to approximately 3,000 ads per day, through logos, billboards, and television commercials, even our choices of brands. But in today’s society, one of the most used and influential tools of advertising are women. But the unfortunate thing is that women are not just viewed as actresses in these ads but as objects for people to look at, use, abuse, and more. In her fourth installment in a line of documentaries, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne explains the influence of advertising women and popular culture, and its relationship to gender violence, sexism and racism, and eating disorders.

Jean Kilbourne’s film, Killing Us Softly 4, depicts the way the females are shown in advertisements. She discusses how advertisement sell concepts of normalcy and what it means to be a “male” and a “female.” One of her main arguments focuses on how women aspire to achieve the physical perfection that is portrayed in advertisements but this perfection is actually artificially created through Photoshop and other editing tools. Women in advertisements are often objectified as weak, skinny, and beautiful while men are often portrayed as bigger and stronger. Advertisements utilize the setting, the position of the people in the advertisements, and the products to appeal to the unconscious aspect

Have you ever picked up a magazine and browse through it for five minutes? How many pages do you think you saw in the time you had? Not many. Now, how many women you saw posing in different ways to sell a product? A lot right. From selling a hamburger to a 2016 new car a woman is portray as one more object to sell a product. We see it in newspapers, magazines, on television, the internet and it has reached to the point that wherever you look there’s a sexual advertisement. We live under a lot of advanced technology that nowadays advertising plays a huge role in our society. According to National Domestic Violence statistics state that twenty-four people per minute are victims of some type of violence by an intimate partner in the United States. Jean Kilbourne in her article “Two ways a woman can get hurt: advertising and violence” argues how these advertisements affects us, how we don’t care about it because it is seen as “normal” nowadays and how it impacts us in our daily lives. Emphasizing that its target is to dehumanize and objectify women because nothing material fulfills our needs. All this advertising going around encourages certain ways of acting and leads to misunderstandings, they are harming us more than they are helping us. Meaning that they are teaching and giving false messages to young relationships. Consequently, man and women are being misrepresented as sex symbols and tools by the media. Therefore, how all these advertisements contribute to affect

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

In the article, ‘“Empowering” my Ass” (2017), Gaby Del Valle asserts her opinions on the issue of women-centered advertising. She views the concept of “empowertising”, as coined by Andi Zeisler, as just another scheme companies have implemented to make more money. Del Valle forwardly states: “The messaging has changed, but the purpose remains the same: Companies want you to buy their shit, and they’re happy to trick you into thinking consumerism is a form of self-expression to do so.” She provides examples of companies and aspiring brands who have recently begun integrating the concept of women empowerment into their advertising techniques. Brands such as Dove, Blink Fitness, Nike, and Aerie have all benefitted from spotlighting the idea

Mass media plays a great part in our lives. Television, newspapers, magazines surround us everywhere every day of our lives. All of them are stuck with different kinds of ads. But how often do we pay attention to the real sense of those ads and the ways the advertisers try to sell various products to us? We see dissoluteness and challenging behavior every day in life and we got so used to it in, at first sight, such small pieces of film, and apparently of our day routine, as advertisement, that we hardly notice the big picture. For over twenty years, Jean Kilbourne has been writing, lecturing, and making films about how advertising affects women and girls. In her essay, "‘The Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt':

Everyday we expose ourselves to thousands of advertisements in a wide variety of environments where ever we go; yet, we fail to realize the influence of the implications being sold to us on these advertisements, particularly about women. Advertisements don’t just sell products; they sell this notion that women are less of humans and more of objects, particularly in the sexual sense. It is important to understand that the advertising worlds’ constant sexual objectification of women has led to a change in sexual pathology in our society, by creating a culture that strives to be the unobtainable image of beauty we see on the cover of magazines. Even more specifically it is important to study the multiple influences that advertisements have

Many young women in today’s society struggle with confidence and their body image. This is a huge problem in society and many people have spoken out against the influence of media on women’s body image. However, it continues to be a major problem and more can always be done to raise awareness about societies unrealistic expectations for women’s beauty. Dove’s Choose Beautiful campaign was started to promote the self-esteem of women and encourage them to see their beauty, however there are some criticisms, including the company using this campaign to increase their sales. Dove is selling a product with the expectation that confident, beautiful women will purchase it, however people still have the ability to resist the ad industry.