Lane Bryant's Argument Essay

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.

Victoria’s Secret’s ad The Perfect ”Body” features ten young models each wearing a unique bra and panty set standing side by side. The target audience of the ad is Caucasian women ages 18 to 30 years old although the ad could be relevant to girls as young as 15 years old and as old as 40 years old. They are targeting them by featuring primarily young Caucasian women in their ad. While the ad appears to feature two non-Caucasian women, I believe this is a simple nod of inclusion as they are not representative of the diverse women in America. Both models have straightened hair and very European facial features.

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).

Like stated before, Aerie shows African American, Asian, Latina, and Caucasian girls in this specific ad. Most advertising directed towards adolescents, pictures white men and women. Jennifer E. Millard and Peter R. Grant examined how black and white women were portrayed in photographs and found that black women are found in more submissive or less sexually provoking poses than white women (659). While most of the women in Aerie’s ad (three out of six) were Caucasian women, the other three models were minorities which is a big step in advertising. Millard and Grant’s study also found preliminary results that black women are underrepresented in photographs and expressed difficulty even finding photographs of black women that would work for their study (670). The fact that Aerie includes not only black women but also a Latina and Asian model is incredibly significant because of the underrepresentation of minorities in fashion

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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 question on why was T. Hall got singled out for scrutiny is not a simple one in my eyes. T. Hall may have been singled out for a number of reasons. The first being because T. Hall was crossing dressing thus causing confusing within the community. The second being T. Hall born as a hermaphrodite (or intersexed) and saw herself/himself as both a man and a woman which put him/her under more scrutiny, although this only came into light after she/he was under scrutiny . One of Last thing I understood being reading the information is because she/he would take on the roles of both a male and female at different points throughout life. This caused T. Hall’s neighbors to have a trail to try to help them with the indentation of T. Hall’s role/place

In the United States woman can suffer from identity issues. In the year 2016 the first plus size model was shown on the cover of the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated named Ashley Graham. Ashley Graham comes from the white ethnic background. As the issue was talked about on multiple radio and TV stations, African American woman have been speaking on this matter. A woman, Chantelle Nunes Norman, who is an African American woman posts “She's a perfect size in the African American community. It's a real shame that a lot of whites consider a starved looking woman attractive, I think she is beautiful at this size and would look sickly if she were skin and bones (Feldon)”. Many issues can come around this logic. One of the main

When Victoria’s Secret is allowed to have models prance around on screen but Lane Bryant Ads (lingerie for plus size women) is banned then there’s a problem. The media is portraying these models who are thin to the point where it is unhealthy. And the media is feeding society lies. A perfect example is of Gerran Tyler. Tyler was a 12 year old supermodel. She walks the run way for clients like Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, and Betsey Johnson. She’s tall, thin, the perfect model because she hasn’t hit puberty yet. She walked during New York Fashion Week and posed for these designer brands advertisements. This body type is unachievable for almost all adult women (Roberts). Somebody in their twenties or thirties doesn’t have the ability to look like a twelve year old girl, but this is how these designers are telling us to look. Tyler had an amazing career and high expectations but the fame didn’t last long. As she got older and hit puberty she began to develop boobs, hips, and curves. She began getting less and less bookings. Her supermodel career was virtually over. “Eighty percent of 10-year-old American girls say they have been on a diet” and the, “Number one magic wish for young girls 11-17 is to be thinner” (Missrepresentation). This self-esteem problem with young girls is a result of these unobtainable ideas of beauty. Jennifer Siebel, creator of the documentary Missrepresentation, says

A new study in the NCA’s Communication Monographs discovered that when women, who were hocked up to a heart monitor, viewed images of other women with the same or similar body type to their own. There were more reports of body positivity and less social comparison. While there is more growing awareness of plus-size models there is also starting to be more demand for plus-size clothing in more styles. When a heavier set woman goes to flip through a magazine and all they see is skinny models being portrayed as beautiful and smart, yet this starts to take a mental toll on them. Thoughts of self-discrimination can lead to low self-esteem issues. To help with these thoughts fashion industries have now started putting plus-size women on their runways, such as the Lane Bryant’s #ImNoAngle and Dove’s Real Beauty campaigns.

When researchers asked one hundred eighteen female, college-aged students to look at twenty pictures in ads from women's magazines, they felt a sudden change in mood after the pictures were observed. There was notable depression in the women, a depression that has seemed to hit many women after leafing through women's magazines (Key and Lindgren 11). This depression is due to the fact there are so many negative messages being conveyed in advertisements that are published in women's magazines. But who can blame the women for their depression anyway? When the majority of the ads in women's magazines show super-skinny models advertising nice clothes, makeup, jewelry, etc., one might find themselves to be a little down. Skinny models portray their figures to be the cultural norm in Western society today. How often does one find a model in a woman's magazine that is over a size six that is not shown advertising plus size merchandise? The answer is not very often, or sometimes never at all. If women do not see their body type being depicted in

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.

These are just some of the comments I stumble upon on someone’s body positive Instagram post. The post is often a photo of the said person - be it a selfie or a full body photo - along with hashtags such as “#bodypositivity,” “#loveyourself,” “#bodyacceptance,” and other hashtags along those lines. It also isn’t uncommon for me to come across body positive articles by media outlets like Buzzfeed or Huffington Post on my timeline, with headlines such as “X Star is a Huge Inspiration for the Body Positive Movement” or “X Star Opens Up about Body Positivity” appearing more frequently on my news feed. People are starting to talk

More recently, Sports Illustrated model, Kate Upton whom is a size 4, is now considered a plus size model and deemed to be “too curvy”. In the United States the “normal” sized woman is between the size of 6 and 10. Most of us do not understand why some put themselves through so much anguish to satisfy these body image complexes. Back in the 1950’s, models were