Magazine Advertisements Have Unhealthy Effects On Young Women

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

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).

Furthermore, media surrounds teenage girls in today’s culture. It is impossible to escape the sight of media. The media’s constant idealistic beauty is ever present to a vast amount of self-conscious girls. This image of beauty causes girls to have low self-esteem (Clay, Vignoles, and Dittmar). Media defining this perfect body image causes many adolescent girls to feel dissatisfied with their bodies and become depressed. “Viewing ultra-thin or average-size models led to decreases in both body satisfaction and self-esteem in adolescent girls aged eleven to sixteen, with changes in self-esteem fully mediated by changes in body satisfaction” (Clay, Vignoles, and Dittmar).

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

The influence of the media on all aspects of culture and society has been a issue around the world. One of the social cultural aspects particularly influenced by the media is body image. A surprisingly large number of individuals, the majority of which are young women, develop their body image in with the ideas advanced by the media, which judge women’s attractiveness based on how thin they are. Body-image plays a very important role in our individualistic society. Modern beauty image standards which favor thin body image create an unrealistic expectation on young women, often resulting in eating disorders and other destructive practices, like self-harming, unnecessary or elective cosmetic surgery, decreased self-esteem and the use of harmful substances, like diuretics.

Magazines advertisements portray beauty using models that are usually abnormally thin. This makes most woman, especially those who are young, feel inferior and insecure about their own bodies. They believe they will only be beautiful if they look like the women in the magazines. Most women will try going on a crazy diets like the tapeworm diet, or the baby food diet, just to try to look like the models on the cover of magazines. Even young girls see the magazines as a reflection of what they should look like when they get older. Woman will stare at themselves in the mirror and find all kinds of things wrong with their body, face, and clothing. They will compare anything and everything from their weight to their hair to the models on

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

This is an advertisement for NATAN, a women’s fashion company. In the ad, there are two similar photos shown: one of which shows a white man presenting a closed jewellery box to a white woman who is sitting in a short dress, heels and has her legs crossed. In the second photo, it shows the same man and woman but a different scenario in which the man has opened the jewellery box to show a ring. In response to the ring the woman has opened her legs. The ad is captioned, ‘The first remote control ever invented…’ (Juergen, 2015).

Drug advertisements usually demonstrate women through some sort of preconceived judgment. In Plan B One-Step drug advertisement, these stereotypes about women are made particularly clear by assuming that women who require this pill were being unsafe and irresponsible during sexual intercourse (Halas, 2008, p. 4). This is bias as the ad does not consider that the reason a woman may need to take this drug is because all of the necessary precautions she took, failed to work effectively. Plan B One-Step drug advertisement defines and constructs the category of woman, women’s health, and the interplay of science and culture by conveying to readers that women constantly need assistance from physicians, which ultimately results in doctors diminishing women’s health concerns because to them women do not know anything about their body. For this reason, drug advertisements, specifically Plan B One-Step lists mostly medical terms that only individuals in the medical profession can understand. This can be detrimental to women who are planning on buying Plan B One-Step as many will not be able to truly comprehend what this drug can impose on their body (Healthfacts, 2008, p. 252). Sadly, this is the reality for women in today’s society. According to Rhonda Love’s article, “The Power of Science and Medicine” all men and women are influenced by dominant standards; thus dehumanizing women through all forms of communication, specifically in advertisements (1994, p. 24). Therefore,

“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human mind long enough to get money from it” –Stephen Butter Leacock. The invention of television in 1920s changed the advertising game forever. Many good things came from this like the fact that advertising has made it much easier for companies to reach larger audience but it has encouraged many unethical behaviors from the media. One major example of this negative effect is objectification of men and women and showing the negative prospects of society. I looked at two articles that talk about how a specific gender is being attacked by advertisers. The articles are “Adversities: Men Are Not

It is worldwide known issue that advertisements portraying women a certain way which causes body image issues. It has been researched and discussed in the media on ways to change this unrealistic body image we expect women to have when selling products. The thing is, did you know that not only using women as sex objects in ads is causing a body image epidemic, it is causing companies to lose money. “Femvertsing” is what advertising companies need to start doing. “Femvertising defined by moderator Samantha Skey, as profemale messaging within advertising” (Bahadur, 2014).

Throughout the past five years of advertising, women have been seen as nothing more than underdressed and oversexualized objects for men to look at. Women have been shown in advertisement as carefree and problem free people who belong in the kitchen. According to most advertisements, a woman is supposed to be getting guys drinks and taking care of their every need, and doing whatever a man says because he is in charge. Advertisements that oversexualize and overdramatize a woman’s looks and behaviors make it hard for a man to take them seriously, and sometimes men believe that it is okay to treat a woman as a sexual object, because “hey, everyone else is doing it.” Also, because of advertisements that oversexualize a woman, it makes younger

If advertisements are going to cut off women’s heads or faces, then they should also cut off a man’s face and head. If advertisements are selling the same product then both men and women need to be treated equally, when it comes to being paid.

In terms of women and sex appeal, the world of advertising has changed a considerable amount. Many of the advertisements which are seen in newspapers, magazines, and television fail to portray women in a more positive light. The image of females in numerous advertisements are merely viewed as fascinating "objects" while they are also being displayed in a fashion that is supposed to appeal only to men, i.e. exploitation of the body. Though these types of advertisements are very effective at selling their products to consumers, it seems as if the minds ' of women, especially younger women/teenage girls are being corrupted as they are pressured to live up to the ideal image: sexy and thin with a little extra curves.

Models and advertisements in magazines highly influences teenage girl’s self-esteems. “Magazine advertisements aren’t that great but they work. Some girls believe that buying these products advertised will make them less insecure” (Levine 239). When magazines advertise they show various body parts. For example, magazines could advertise shoes by showing a girl’s legs with a thigh gap. Girls will want the thigh gap that the model has. They will start to wonder why they don 't have them. Another example is that magazines will advertise makeup and the girls face will look flawless. Some girls may believe that the makeup will help them also look flawless. Thin women featured in magazines and most media gives