Pamela Anderson's Use Of Sex Symbols In Advertising

advertising until the end when she is taking a small bite of the burger. This ad gives clear image of what woman's body should

"I do not think that marketers should use sex in advertisements. Sex makes things look more appealing, but it isn't a reason to buy a garment. I definitely look at the ads, but I am not naive enough to think that by simply buying what the model was wearing, I would look like him/her. I definitely think that sex has an effect on consumers, but more on the opposite sex of the model than on the sex that would probably be buying the product." Krista Funke

Advertisements are literally everywhere, from ad pop-ups on your computer to the billboards you can see driving down the road. The purpose of these advertisements are to sell a specific item to an audience. The audience being the consumers and the ads being products such consumers purchase, the advertisements try to persuade the viewers that they need that item and that they should buy their companies product. While Schneider alcoholic beverages attempt to sell their product to adults through their advertisements by using very suggestive advertisement method which sexualized alcohol. In addition to using ethos, pathos, and logos to draw in their audience. Lastly, how this sexualized imagery is effecting the world

Women should not be exposed on an ad about becoming a vegetarian due to the suggested violence. The suggested violence in advertisements could be the reason why women everyday are being degraded just because of their gender. There is no excuse to having a woman naked to get across a point. This organization demeans women by taking her, making her naked, and showing off the parts of her body to get a completely off topic view across. Advertisers have come to the point where they will do anything and say anything to sell a product or an idea. Kilbourne explains that “there is no doubt that flagrant sexism and sex role stereotyping abound in all forms of the media” (283). Kilbourne elucidates that women play roles as a piece of meat on television. Women are not portrayed as strong people in most advertisements and because of that, there becomes a normalcy to women not being strong people, which in the long run creates stereotypes.

Within the advertisement they broadcast systemically reenforced and exaggerated a large number of stereotypes about both men and women. Some may wonder, however, how this really effects everyday life. If someone sees so many ads in a day what is one more, one that is just a bit more sexist than the typical beer ad. While this it is true that the average person is overstimulated by the number of ads as it is there is still something to be said for the content of the ads. Even if a person doesn’t mentally acknowledge them the brain still notes them and stores them in the brain. If time after time one sees women in the submissive role or treated as objects, chances are they will start subconsciously believing it. On the other hand if men are constantly portrayed as stupid and hormone driven then that bias will start to seep into reality. There are also significant moral issues with this ad, if time after time women are portrayed simply as a visual feast it changes how they will be treated for the rest of their lives. Next time they walk down the street theres a chance a man may catcall her, acknowledging the fact that she was in some way appealing to him. He doesn’t do this because she is smart, funny or kind he does this simply because he was pleased by her appearance and may even think he is complementing her. However, by doing this he reenforces what the media has

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.

There are countless advertisements in the media, weather videos, newspapers, magazines articles, or even billboards that have the face or the body of a women display as the main background of the advertisements. Hardees advertises their food by showing an oversexualized woman eating a burger or sandwich. This is just one of many examples of the way advertisements, ads for short, oversexualize woman in the media.

An important controversial issue that America faces today is the debate of sex in advertising. Edward A. McCabe and John Carroll are two authors that present opposing arguments about this issue. McCabe persuades the reader into thinking that sex in advertising is no big deal, while Carroll explains why this is a major problem in America. Sex ads are defined as any type of advertising that shows pictures of partial nudity with wording that relates to the body in a sexual way, usually portraying women. Sex in advertising has been around for a long time but has the industry become too sexually explicit?

According to the article, Why Sex Sells...More Than Ever, “Using sex to sell everything from alcohol to banking services has increased over the years: 15 percent of ads studied used sex as a selling point in 1983. That percentage grew to 27 percent in 2003,” (Why Sex Sells…). And we can assume percentages went nowhere but up from there. Having ads sell on sex appeal is not only happening in the United States of America, but all over the world as well. “In 2003, as with previous years, approximately 30% of all complaints to the Australian Advertising Standards Board related to portrayal of sex/sexuality/nudity and for the past four years this has been the most common issue prompting complaints,” (Beer, Boats, and

This ad is multidimensional in the way that it demeans women. The first layer is equating the women with inanimate objects. The women are being scaled down to the size of beer bottles as though they were barbie dolls, meant to be played with and molded by the hands of the viewer. The model lays with her legs spread and her chest pushed out in a hypersexualized submissive pose. She looks up at the viewer with a coy smile. Ads like these are meant to sell to an adult male audience. They are made by men with the intention of making money and the understanding that if you offer a typical American male the idea of sex with a physically attractive woman and equate that to a product, he will buy almost anything. This type of imagery also affects how women feel that they should act. Viewing images of women as sex objects in these submissive poses causes women to feel that they are only valuable if they fit the ideals put in place by the heterosexual male gaze.

In 2016, the United States spent 190 billion U.S. dollars on advertisements, almost double the amount of money on advertising than the next largest ad market (Statista). These ads advertise a multitude of different products. The ads are exposed to society in many different ways, from the breaks in between songs on the radio, to the ads shown online. Ads are targeted to a specific group of people, usually, the target demographic the brand wants to buy their product. Brands will often use women’s bodies in a sexual way to get people to stop and look at their ads. Over the last few decades, speakers and activists have seen advertisements becoming more sexual and more demeaning towards women. Activist Jean Kilbourne has been analyzing ads and has been bringing awareness to this issue for years through her four documentaries. In her documentary, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne asserts women’s bodies are often dismembered, portrayed with an unattainable, “ideal” body type, and despite advances in the women’s movement, the objectification of women in ads have gotten worse. The two images below illustrate these ideas.

"Whether unconsciously reproduced or deliberately crafted to appeal to the psychic contradictions and ambivalence of its intended audience, the disparity comes from the recesses of our most sediments, unquestioned notions about gender" (Bordo 170). The woman in the ad is looked upon as being able to control her eating habits, but also able to control herself while on the other hand men eat freely. These types of advertisements work well because society has given them reason to.

The Carl’s Jr Tex Mex Bacon Thickburger Commercial shown on television is a clear example of how women are objectified in advertising. The ad is to promote the idea of the new TexMex thickburger but how you may ask? It includes two models representing Mexico and the other United States. Both women are in tight fitted cheeky bikinis competing over whether the fast food is “Tex” or “Mex” playing volleyball. The idea of the commercial was made to appeal to men in seeking an attraction from the target audience using women in a sexual aesthetic. As both men are watching from the bleachers they are sure enjoying the women compete on who is right. “Should we tell them it’s both?” a man watching the game adds before his friend is quick to answer “eventually”, this bodily language emphasizes that both men already know it’s both Tex and Mex combined but want to watch the women as they are jumping around playing dirty in such bikinis. The ad has created a way to lure men to purchase a specific brand of burger using women’s body. Generally, it’s a win win situation because advertisements affect cultural ideas and what people desire, the influence of individuals is overlooked more than the actual persuading of buying the product. In “Can’t Buy My Love” and Killing Us Softly by Jean Kilbourne she relates society as a passive mirror where advertisements develop an effective pervasive medium of influence because as people consume ads they see they will eventually base it off themselves personally. With ad’s constantly lingering, our mind is presented to subconsciously process the ad and the sexual appearances. Therefore, by showing these attractive women as a highlight, it advertises the objective of women in making you crave this specific burger.

On the other side of the argument when I think about women in advertisements typically the commercial revolves around their attractiveness. Food advertisements usually have attractive scantily clad women eating the food that the restaurant serves. “Go Daddy” is a website domain company. The name itself is interesting. Their Super Bowl commercials a couple of years ago were always notorious. They always featured barley clothed women doing very risqué things. It toed the line between being TV appropriate and being too much.

The Tiger Beer advertisement shown in the appendix is a clear example of the objectification of women in advertising. The Tiger Beer advert was made to appeal to men from the age of 20 to 60. The advert seeks to get a cheap laugh from the target audience with the image of the woman in a sexual pose and the picture of the beer. The ad promotes the idea that beer is the most