Commercials And Film: Beauty Pressure By Naomi Wolf

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

The Beauty Myth’s central argument is the growing standards of physical beauty of women as they grow stronger. This standard has affected women in many ways, such as in the workplace, culture, and religion. The standard has taken over the work of social harassment. The beauty myth expands the belief an unbiased measurement of beauty exists and that women want to express it and men would want that women. The author, Naomi Wolf, states that the beauty myth is not about women themselves, it is about the power of men and their society. The myth supplies power to multibillion dollar cosmetics industries and it keeps women from rising too high in the workplace. Within this book, Wolf shows how the beauty myth functions and affects women in the workplace, media, sex, religion, culture, violence against women by men, and by women themselves in the configuration of cosmetic surgery and eating disorders.

For centuries, women have found it to be difficult to live up and be the standard “runaway model”. Women have the pressure to fit in to be considered beautiful since ads and media have distorted society in how they view and evaluate beauty. The false representation of models in the beauty commercials have made women want to replicate them even though they don’t know what’s behind the editing. Even though this is a huge matter, companies did not stand back but instead made more commercials that self-degrade women constantly, except one. The Dove Evolution Commercial- “Campaign for Real Beauty” focuses on the way they change women sending a strong message to women about beauty and what it really

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

To begin with, the media industry has the power to decide what reaches the public’s eye; therefore, they present to the public their versions of what “beautiful’ women should appear like. The media has created their version of what the “ideal body” should be. They continuously show the audience photographic images of models that appear extremely thin. Media meticulously chooses women with bodies which media calls “sexy”. Spectators rarely get a glance of women who are overweight. For example, all of the actress that make an appearance on television shows are below what is considered a healthy weight. Yet, this concept is what media has defined as beautiful, influencing many women to obtain a thin figure. As a result, of these messages sent by

“The Beauty Myth” written by Naomi Wolf is an essay written to present how the advancements of women in social power lead to a societal backlash that lead to a woman’s value being equated to her appearance by both sexes. This devaluation of women has led to a harmful relationship with food and women subjecting themselves to mental and physical torture to be thin. Wolf describes in the 1920s was the first time that women became “preoccupied with dieting and thinness” after receiving the right to vote. In the 1950s, women’s curves were celebrated again because “their minds were occupied in domestic seclusion.” According to Wolf, when women were in male spheres, “that pleasure had to be overridden by an urgent social

Society’s deeply ingrained standards for women created by the media demonstrate the corruption of self image as seen through ads from the 1950s that feed off of insecurities. History demonstrates the obsession with perfection by showing how women were viewed before and after advertising influence, “Men wouldn 't look at me when I was skinny… Since I’ve gained 10 pounds, I have all the dates I want” (Lewis). Ads such as this swayed women from the 1950s to 1960s to physically appear in a

There are rules in place meant to instill the value of slimness in women and shame women who deviate from those ideals. West (2016) describes the ideal women in her chapter Bones as “graceful” and “slim” and “she can put her feet up on a chair and draw her knees to her chest. She can hold an ocean in her clavicle.” Harris-Moore (2016) discusses in her chapter about mass media and perfection that the recent steps away from the slim ideal are seen in the recent Dove campaigns featuring “real” women who more resemble Lena Dunham’s nakedness. Harris-Moore goes on to state while that is a progressive idea, ABC did not want to air a Lane Bryant commercial in which a fuller-figure woman lounged around her apartment in lingerie. This may because the woman is in lingerie and ABC is reluctant to sexualize fuller-figured bodies, or because the commercial deviates too far from the thin ideal with a commercial model being portrayed in a nude landscape where her “imperfections” are the selling point. The Dove commercial is showing “real women,” portraying nakedness, while the Lane Bryant commercial is portraying a nude

In her article “The Body Beautiful”, Rosalind Coward (1998) argues that society creates a negative obsessions of the “perfect” female body and it affects women negatively in their daily lives. She explains that women have to think of their bodies in separate parts and believe that each part has a different life of their own. Coward goes on to explain the way society expects women to be seen as by providing readers with example advertisements and how it pushes women toward having the body that is viewed acceptable. She concludes by stating that although society creates a negative obsession of the “perfect” body, it helps women from falling into despair because they keep a vague relation to the ideal image. By analyzing an advertisement for Elizabeth Arden’s anti aging serum, we see Rosalind Coward argues that advertisements for facial product often expect women to be flawless and perfect in their body figures.

The ideas that society has put in our minds is that a woman has to be slim, look perfect and always be ready for a photoshoot. All of the women in this movie trailer have a very similar body type, these women are all slim, tall and beautiful which shows that the movie industry has narrow vision.” The beauty of the woman as objects and screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilty but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look,” (Mulvey, 2006, p. 349). The idea of a women being able to stay fit as well as being on top of all the modern fashion trends, and looking ‘perfect’ is very unrealistic. This is portrayed in the movie trailer when the one mother played by Mila Kunis is in a workout class or when her and her friends are having conversation in regards to her bra. When it comes to women’s careers they are expected to wear appropriate clothing that portrays them as professional, this allows them to be respected in the workplace. “The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth,” (Wolf,1991, p. 18). Society continues to push the ideology that all women have to be the same size and dress certain ways in the workplace through different methods of media including movie

Writing for the Huffington Post, Temimah Zucker presents her opinion on society’s expectation for women in America through different forms of communication and advertisement. Zucker’s article is based off of what you as a woman, think of yourself, versus what society thinks of you. Zucker believes that society’s opinions and beliefs will constantly change through the generations, but your thoughts about your own beauty will not become gray to you; “Beauty is molded by society -- by the advertising, fashion, and cosmetic industries. We live in a society of billboards and ads, Photoshop, and Botox. We are trained to believe that size two is perfect, while most healthy women in America fit into a size 12.” (1)

Why are women and men pressured because of an image of skin and bones or walking muscles? Most commercials and magazines flicker photos every second of photoshopped or unrealistic bodies. In addition, Americans on average spend 250 billion hours watching television. More importantly, children and teenagers gape at 20,000 commercials a year. Using unflawed advertisements, they gnaw at children's minds into thinking they aren't beautiful. For example, women are accentuated to live up to the expectations of a Victoria's Secret model--a skinny waist, huge breasts, and meaty thighs. Men, on the other hand, are bombarded with pictures of a projected, heavily built abdomen. In society, people are driven to look like living Barbie dolls. Human beings shouldn't have the weight on their chest to look like the model on an advertisement. Several people can have higher expectations of a person, develop eating disorders, and even lose self-esteem.

In her documentary, Jean Kilbourne addresses how the images in advertisements have impacted women, men, girls, and boys. New Beauty: The Beauty Authority, is a

For many years, woman have been shown in the media as over sexualized and unrealistically beautiful.With barely any diversity and extremely thin models on most media outlets these characteristics have become the beauty standard many people are trying to achieve. This has been so much of a problem that Margaret Lazarus has dedicated a 4 volume presentation on the portrayal of woman and the unrealistic beauty images in media as compared to men. Lazarus titles it , Killing Me Softly, and in this presentation she also examines all the things that we may not have noticed in

The standards are created by society and portrayed in advertisements through media. Women are viewed as “objects” by men as they are meant to be “looked at” through the men’s gaze (Rice 392). The greatest power of women consists of the sexuality they portray, as the woman in the ad is presenting beauty as the ticket to success, encouraging body modification through the consumption to achieve the perfect look. Females looking at themselves through the mirror is one of the major themes in advertising, especially in this makeup ad because “beauty was believed to derive from inner qualities such as character, morality…” (393), pushing women towards the purchase of cosmetics. Since the early century to even now, white is more superior than dark which resulted in products such as skin whitening to become popular for black women. In the ad, the woman is white and has a perfect body figure correlating with sexiness, self-discipline and successful, whereas, fat is seen as unattractive and unhealthy (400). An unhealthy woman looking at this ad may feel insecure as she does not fit the expectations, resulting in dieting and unhealthy procedures to meet the desirable look. Furthermore, trying to change your body can lead to harmful conditions such as losing weight the incorrect way and putting bad substances inside your body. The ad