The New Yorker Cover Analysis 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.

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).

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.

The New Yorker is a celebrated magazine that is known for its reporting, essays, and political commentary. Its exemplary status is also attributed to its cartoons and illustrative covers, which are often satirical reinterpretations of current affairs. The demographic of the people who read the New Yorker provides a clue as to the whom the advertisement’s target audience is. They tend to be on the liberal spectrum, mostly college educated people in their early 30s to late 50s.

In the New York Time Article by Timothy William, Inquiry to Examine Racial Bias in the San Francisco Police Department, first thing to remember known as implied social perception, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Another key point of argument is that there is no systematic bias in the criminal justice base on race. To point out, in performing their policing duties, police officer are able to exercise a high degree of discretion. This means that they have a have a broad freedom to make a decision about how to act on the given situation. For this reason some police officer deliberately use their wide power of discretion and their authority to perform acts of misconduct. In this article it is generally agreed that discrimination based on racial or ethnic origin is morally wrong and a violation of the principle of impartiality. In fact impartiality principles requires that those who are equal be treated equally based on similarities, and that race not be a relevant consideration in the assessment. However, in May, District Attorney George Gascon appointed a three-judge body of distinguished jurists to look into bias in the department following a series of misconduct scandals, the most troubling being a group of police officers who were caught sending racist text messages. Now, the scope, aim, participants and timeline of the ongoing investigation have been revealed in a series

The Coddling of the American Mind, basically means cleaning campuses of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause someone discomfort or that may be offensive. Many authors have written about this occurrence with others having to face lawsuits for having not followed the written code in their writings. In Jeannie Suk’s article for the New Yorker, she asks her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law or even mention the word violate because it could make the students become distressed. Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, had a complaint filed against her for writing an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education talking of campus politics of sexual paranoia. The coddling of the American mind has led to the oversensitivity of students who cannot take a non-threatening joke and whose professors have to be careful of the words they use in their lectures.

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.

Sexist ads show that society is dominated by the same masculine values that have controlled the image of women in the media for years. Sexist advertisement reinforces gender stereotypes and roles, or uses sex appeal to sell products, which degrades the overall public perception of women. The idea that sexism is such a rampant problem comes from the stereotypes that are so deeply embedded into today’s society that they almost seem to be socially acceptable, although they are nowhere near politically correct. Images that objectify women seem to be almost a staple in media and advertising: attractive women are plastered all over ads. The images perpetuate an image of the modern woman, a gender stereotype that is reinforced time and time again by the media. These images are accepted as “okay” in advertising, to depict a particular product as sexy or attractive. And if the product is sexy, so shall be the consumer. In the 1970s, groups of women initially took issue with the objectification of women in advertisements and with the limited roles in which these ads showed women. If they weren’t pin-ups, they were delicate

Furthermore, In Warshow’s review of E.B White and the New Yorker, experience again is at the forefront of his critique, along with a bit of his ever present political views. He makes a very important point at the begging of this review, “The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it.” (warshow 2001, 75) This becomes an interesting argument, even today, as we think about what trends we have seen in popular culture. Do we ever ask ourselves if this is something that has been prescribed to us, instead of by us? Journalism, especially from writers of a certain stature, can often dictate where the culture shifts. If we are able to look at the writing with an objective eye then we are simply learning about another facet of the experience. All to often, though, it is hard for us to be objective. This could be why we, as Americans, have popular culture at all. A journalist tells us what is cool, and we subscribe to that idea as an entire culture. There are always outliers, but when talking about popular culture most Americans are in it for the collective effervesces. I think this point would be highly debated by Warshow. As he says at the end of this review, unable to keep his political feelings at bay, “The purpose of this writing is not to say anything about democracy …but only to arouse certain familiar responses in the liberal middle-class reader.” (warshow 2001,78)

There is some bitterness in E.B Whites tone in his essay “Here is New York”. Although New York is special to him, New York is beginning to change into something that White doesn’t like. His bitterness is seen on pages 166 and 167 when he states,” The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions.” I believe that White feels as time goes on New York will self-destruct itself due to increasing technology. With this statement it makes me think that White feels this way because the world is becoming increasingly more

Hello my readers, I know you must have been surprised when you saw this review on the listing of our website, movies.nytimes.com. But only six and a half years ago a movie came out which did not generate outstanding revenue in the box office, being released domestically and only earring $3,090,862. I assume those of you who did see the movie in 2002 have probably forgotten about it by now, and I was not working for the New York Times, so I would like to revisit this film. It is an interpretation of a true story of three young men in Harlem, New York during the 1980s and their rise and fall in the drug dealing business. The actor who plays Mitch in the film (who portrays the true story of Alberto

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

Redbook magazine are devoted to selling products ranging from shoes to shampoo. The entire magazine only has only 210 pages. Approximately 6-8 min of every half hour television show is produced by ad agencies. Americans are bombarded with advertisements. We see them everyday in many different forms and through different mediums. Advertisers study America’s population through a systematic breakdown and analysis of our likes and dislikes in relation to our differences. These differences include gender, sexual orientation, economic status, location, race, ethnicity, and more. Advertisers have substantial knowledge of what appeals to each of these demographics and how these demographics will respond to

The roles of males and females in society have significantly changed, as opposed to the predominant roles in our history. In the modern culture of today, women have begun to break out of the mold that which society has placed her in. This much can’t be said when it comes to modern gender representation in mass media advertising. It can be safe to state that woman are seen as sexual, fragile, exotic—whereas men are portrayed as tough, in control, and aggressive. This trend can be one seen as an inhibitor to the advancement of our culture, because especially for women, it is hard to pull away from the stereotypes that are continuously represented. As examples of the given trend, the following

Thirteen year old Megan Meier befriended and began exchanging messages with someone who she thought was a cute 16 year old boy named Josh Evans on Myspace. The messages from Josh started out complimentary but quickly became hostile, soon leading to other forms of cyberbullying. Meier, already struggling with depression, grew even more depressed as the online harassment continued. On October 16, 2006, Meier hanged herself in her bedroom closet, dying a day later. Soon after, news surfaced that the “Josh Evans” Meier had been communicating with was not an actual person, but simply a fake account. A mother in Meier’s neighborhood ran the account, claiming that she made it in order to ascertain how Meier felt and what Meier was saying about her daughter. Due largely in part to a mother’s deep entrenchment in her daughter’s personal life, Megan Meier committed suicide, serving as an extreme example of the dangers of an overbearing parent. George Saunders’s 2009 short story first published in The New Yorker (later republished in his 2013 collection of short stories The Tenth of December: stories) also relays the dangers of overbearing parenting, but in a more direct manner.