Using Sexual Interest For The Male Audience

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.

Today's media is increasingly pornographic, and the notion that 'sex sells' has infiltrated the advertising of virtually all products and services. Both men and women are sexualized in contemporary media, but the extent to which women are sexualized is far greater that men are. Jean Kilbourne states in her talk, The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women, "There are stereotypes that harm men, of course, but they tend to be less personal, less related to the body." The stereotypes that drive the portrayal of women in the media lead to the repeated objectification, particularly sexual objectification,

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).

Magazines play a part in creating the image of sex sells. Advertisers use an image to create an advertisement to sell a product. The Purpose of advertising is not to sell sex, but to attract the consumer. Their talent is the ability to transform seemingly neutral object to create a desirable product. It’s no wonder that we are so

The use of sexualization also reinforces a pattern of gender roles that are currently circulating throughout advertisements. More often than not, women who are used as ploys in ads are seen doing household chores like vacuuming, changing the toilet paper, or making coffee. Females are rarely ever seen in a work place, and definitely not in a powerful position. In fact, the directors of most of these ads place women below or behind the man to show who has the power in actuality. Women are seen as skinny, fragile, and immobile in high heels, while men are strong and powerful. By setting up such a strong binary between the two different groups, it is obvious that the majority of the American society will not be able to fit into these roles, and it leaves a sense of rejection for the average person. This rejection, accepted by the viewers, manifests

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

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.

In society, women are held to a very high social standard. The pressure to look as perfect as all the models in magazines have driven many girls to an impossible fixation. Not only is it seen as a social norm, but also people do not even realize the degrading images of women in our everyday surroundings. After watching “Killing Us Softly”, this ideal was brought to my attention more that almost every advertisement piece that involves women promotes sexualization, objectification, and reinforces the feminine gender roles in America.

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

The extent to which women were presented as sex objects was calculated using a coding system. Every woman in each of the randomly selected 30 magazines was interpreted using a system that was similar to the method that Blaha used. Some of the categories that were coded were the percentage of face shown, gaze, product, expression, body pose, body part focus, degree of clothing, type of clothing, and whether or not the ad was seen as respectful

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

Female sexuality has been a controversial subject that plays a crucial role in our everyday lives. There is a constant double standard women face. In terms of sexuality both males and females are more similar than society deems them. It begins with parents; they have a great impact on how their daughters view sex and their own sexuality. Also female sexuality is considered taboo when they become mothers. There is a never ending battle of hypocrisy that women face when it comes to sexuality. These problems are influenced by gender roles, socialization, and even religion.

•     Women’s Clothing – Many of the ads within the publication contain women’s clothing & beauty products, with an underlying intent to feed into the insecurities of women by creating additional needs within our American culture. For example, Bonwit’s Shoulder Holder “could quite easily accommodate beach gear, cameras, flight essentials and more”. Bonwit’s uses the advertisement for a woman’s purse to further promote the interest of such accessories as beach gear. Another example comes from Elizabeth Arden’s ad for Secret Cover. Elizabeth Arden goes as far as to say, “This is the way legs should look right now – buffed to a silky finish”.

When an advertiser places one of their advertisements into a newspaper, they want their advertisement to appeal to the readers of that particular magazine. They could have the exact same message, but considering their audience, they could make it more effective if they use a different strategy to market their product. This is very common for advertising strategies to change when the content of the magazine changes. You can relate the way that the magazine producers choose their ads by when Steve Craig says that "…program producers and schedulers must consider the target audience needs of their clients" (162). The types of advertisements are driven by the content of the magazine. Sports Illustrated provides a