Essay about American Sexploitation

Every time you flip a magazine, change channels, or go online, you are struck with images of models who are super skinny with flashy outfits and have excessive make-up on. Ads not only try to sell their products, but also promote how females should look like. These models are airbrushed and photo shopped which is false advertisement. The media progressively encourages a thinner body image as the ideal for women. We see advertisements every day. Some of these ads use manipulative strategies that influence our choices and spending habits. For example, “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines included a focus on appearance, and most advertisements used appeal to beauty to sell their products.”(Teen Health) To grab the viewers’ attention, especially females, they include

Jean Kilbourne is an advocate for women and is leading a movement to change the way women are viewed in advertising. She opens up the curtains to reveal the hard truth we choose to ignore or even are too obtuse to notice. Women are objectified, materialized, and over-sexualized in order to sell clothes, products, ideas and more. As a woman, I agree with the position Kilbourne presents throughout her documentary Killing Us Softly 4: The Advertising’s Image of Women (2010) and her TEDx Talk The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women (2014.) She demonstrates time and again that these advertisements are dangerous and lead to unrealistic expectations of women.

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).

For women, advertising exemplifies the ideal female body. According to Kilbourne, young girls are taught from a very early age that they need to spend lots of time and money to achieve this “physical perfection.” But realistically this cannot be achieved. The ideal woman’s body is Caucasian, very skinny, big breasts, no flaws, and pretty much no pores. This cannot be achieved because it is physically impossible to look like this; the illusion comes from the secret world of Photoshop. No woman is beautiful enough so they leave it to technology to create perfection. The supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford!” She knew the realities of Photoshop and body image, and more women and girls need to become aware of this as well.

Many fitness advertisements proclaim the idea of the "perfect" body. This is done in ads targeting both women and men. This constant display of the "perfect" body causes women and men to feel like they have to look like the featured models to be accepted, which can often lead to negative body images. One source of advertising where the idea of the "perfect" body can often be seen is in print advertisements featured magazines. These fitness advertisements are usually for athletic shoes/clothes or weight-loss products and often feature a model who is thin and toned. As mentioned by Chandler and Sabiston (2009) there are two types of fitness advertising; model-focused and product- focused (Chandler and Sabiston, 2009). With

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

The sexualisation of women in advertising has become a very prominent and controversial issue in today’s society. Many brands, products and campaigns we are presented with portray women as being available and willing sexual objects, who exist to cater to the male gender. Gucci is one such brand that does this, focusing on emphasizing the sexual appeal of the female gender in order to sell their products, because as advertisers know: ‘sex sells.’ This new cultural shift can however, be seen as politically regressive for women, as the ideology it brings negatively impacts how women are viewed by society and how they view themselves.

She does this by describing advertisements for different products. One example she uses is an ad for Possession clothing. She describes the ad by saying “Sometimes it’s ‘all in good fun’ as in the ad for Possession shirts and shorts featuring a man ripping off the clothes off a woman who seems to be having a good time” (492-93). This is an example of how most men in society see women as their property and how they can do whatever they want to them whenever they want. As well as describing the ad for the Possession clothing line, Kilbourne uses an example of a Pepsi commercial featuring Cindy Crawford. The commercial is of Crawford getting out of her car to go buy a Pepsi while being checked out by two young boys (502-03). This is showing how even from a young age, boys are taught that it is okay to view a woman as something that can just be stared at and thought about in ways that are nothing but sexual and objectifying. Kilbourne also makes a point to explain how if the roles were reversed in some advertisements nothing would change. She does this by using an ad for jeans. The ad shows a little boy lifting up a woman’s skirt and looking up it (507). She states “it may seem that I am reading too much into this ad, but imagine if the genders were reversed. We would fear for the little girl who is unzipping a man’s fly in an ad” (507-08). She does this to explain that no

Gender role bias in advertisements has been so prevalent for so long that the untrained eye wouldn't even discern it. All the same, these biases, for the most part, put women in subordinate positions and men in dominant ones. This assumption on both the genders is unfair and demeaning. These ads portray women as subservient and play toys for men. Not only do the models depict an image nowhere near close to reality, but their bodies are scantily clad and what few clothes they are wearing are very revealing.

The most conspicuous part of the advertisement is the image of the woman in front of a black background so that only her face is visible. This in itself is important because it is automatically making her face the focus of the advertisement and not her body. Unlike most advertisements in which a woman’s body is exploited to sell products to men, the UN Women advertisement draws attention to her eyes, therefore making her your equal, since you have to make eye contact with her instead of looking anywhere else on her body. She is completely expressionless, looking at the viewer with a blank stare, a totally blank slate onto which viewer’s reflect their own views. Even more important, the woman pictured is a Muslim woman, as displayed by her hijab. The hijab is widely seen in western society as a form of oppression by men, to make women subservient to them, and by juxtaposing an ad for equality with the

Women across the nation are constantly being sexualized, dehumanized, and objectified due to the use of ads in our society today. We can see this in any ad possible; fast food ads, clothing ads, and even makeup ads. Makeup ads are used to sell brands of makeup to a variety of ages ranging between teenagers through middle aged women. When looking at these ads through any era in our society there seems to be a constant theme in each era; to please the desires of men. In this particular ad selling “Seventeen” makeup in 1947, this theme is apparent. With the main image of the ad and the text provided within it, women are portrayed as objects for

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

Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.

One will see a white female with pouting red lips and the very petite body that resembles a thirteen-year-old girl. The extremely artificial women and the heavily photo-shopped pictures in these ad’s create a norm and make those women who look differently, feel insecure of who they are and make them feel as if they are less of a woman, for example they tend to over represent the Caucasian, blonde with bright eyes, white complexion and a petite body. This is an unattainable beauty for most women, which has caused many to develop issues such as eating disorders, depression and the very much talked about these days, anorexia.

It is interesting to see that now, when things have admittedly changed for women, we still see much of the same themes in modern men’s advertisements. In the ads from “Men’s Journal,” we generally see a handsome, strong, successful and somewhat rugged man. The camera angles are almost invariably from the bottom up, giving us a view of the man as though we, the viewer are below him, looking up at him. All of them are young, but none are teen-aged looking. All but one have, or show remnants of facial hair. None of these ads show the man in the work place, but their depiction of leisure is that of mature success, not youthful excess. Because of the camera angles, the strong stances, the rugged good looks, and the depictions of success, these ads reinforce the stereotypes of