Weasel Words: The Art Of Saying Nothing At All

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.

All around the world in one way or the other, everyone tries to sell an idea or an actual thing. Everyone is always trying to convince each other by using different techniques to sell an idea or a thing. In order to sell and persuade an idea or thing, people have to tell it to an audience by using advertising and rhetorical strategies. Rhetoric is to transform and change a person’s perspective and truly convince them of something. An efficient way that marketers convince through rhetorical strategies is through advertising. A market that uses advertising a lot are beauty commercials like the Dove’s Real Beauty “film” commercial.

They try to play sexual emotions in advertisement. They show an attractive woman and a bottle of beer. They try and make it seem that if you drink their product that you can get this type woman. Also they try and use the emotions of the females talking about how a decent looking woman can become very attractive It also seems to draw onto girls that have a lower self esteem. Showing that you will become a much happier person if you are good looking and dressed very sexually, than if you are not the best of looking person.

Recently American Eagle’s lingerie brand, Aerie, completely changed their advertising campaign to AerieReal. The AerieReal campaign consists of only un-retouched and no Photoshopped models. Before the AerieReal campaign, Aerie used models that were retouched and Photoshopped to make the models appear skinner and “more attractive”. The AerieReal campaign’s focus is to defy what other lingerie brands, such as Victoria’s Secret, sell in their advertisements. Aerie is trying to challenge the message of true beauty is only if you are skinny by saying that “The real you is sexy”. Aerie is accomplishing this by changing their advertisements in the hopes that girls will grow up to be socialized with a more positive and inclusive message, defy gender roles associated with women, and lastly, confront stereotypes of white and colored women.

The two ads have a very different interesting factor of using women to sell their product by creating a psychological aspect to costumers so it will enhance their product of getting sold. Before advertisement became to effect tremendously in the American culture in 1920’s, Americans were going through ambivalence when they were categorized in functional groups such as the old middle class and the new middle class. The old middle class believed that hard work is good for the body and mind because Americans were working longer hours for less money compared to the new middle class that have great opportunities to work new jobs and have satisfaction doing the job while being paid well. Since America has changed to a new middle-class evolution, the economy and social status has shifted tremendously by creating new job opportunities

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.

We are sometimes manipulated into buying these products because it will work wonders or make us feel good about ourselves, well I could say that some products are good heck even amazing. However, there are those that are just plain wrong that are so egger to sell the product just to make profit off of us, not caring whether we are content with how it works. Have you ever wondered why the advertisements just keep repeating sometimes well it’s like they are just planting it in your head about this product that they are trying to sell you and that you must have according to the advertisers. According to writer Sienna Kossman she states how advertisers operate and how they get the consumers to buy the product she say that the way they get them

Weasel words are used in advertisements to mislead people in their claims. Words such as “help” has been the number one

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.

Although the main focus of their ad attracts to plus size women, they're also advertising to other brands found in these magazines. They’re making the argument that plus size women deserve more representation and these brands are not accurately showcasing 67% of American women. Lane Bryant rationalizes that their competitors are doing it all wrong. In Vogue, page to page, ad to ad, there are underweight models clad in scandalous clothing, admiring men in a submissive way. Lane Bryant is saying that there is a problem with how these women are portrayed in magazines and how we accept these pictures of women as the normal. Not only are they fighting to represent plus size women, they're also ending the view society has of the “normal woman” today. "Plus is equal, because everyone is equal,” stated Sabina Karlsson on her online webpage at PlusIsEqual.com. Sabina, just like the other models who are a part of the campaign, want to assure every girl that they’re bodies are not “wrong” simply because they do not look like the pretty, skinny women in the

Lutz points the advertising words being appear to say one thing when in fact they say the opposite or nothing at all. Lutz discuss about the common weasel words in his article. He claims that when a ads says ‘help’ to relieve your cold fast’ that consumers should

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.

In his article, “Weasel Words: The Art of Saying Nothing at All”, William Lutz explains to the reader exactly what weasel words are and how advertisers use these types of weasel words to influence consumers to purchase products. In his article, Lutz explains that they use these types of words to state a certain claim but without holding any promises to those claims that they just made. " The trick is that the claim that comes after the weasel word is usually so strong and so dramatic that you forget the word 'help' and concentrate only on the dramatic claim” (Lutz 521). When they use the word 'help', they usually follow up with a crazy claim that distracts the audience from the weasel word being said and the claim being stated, in turn, promising nothing at all in the advertisement as to what the product can do.

Sue Jozui suggestion to the customers is to boycott these misleading advertisements that do not actualize what the products’ actual purpose will cause or do. With what Sue Jozui has said about these kinds of advertisements, companies only try to get customers hopes and interests spiked up by stating the positive, it is the job as a customer to research a product being endorsed. Whether it is by going online and searching what critics have said about the product, actually testing the product, or getting the product recommended to

I chose to review Lane Bryant’s “I’m no angel” commercial. It is a commercial for Cacique garments sold exclusively at Lane Bryant. The women in the commercial look like curvaceous, voluptuous, full-figured women of different ethnicities. The women are in bras and underwear stating that full-figured women are sexy. Advertisers used key words to promote their products. For example, the women in the commercial used words like “sexy” and “I’m no angel” several times. Advertisers also used close ups and movement to sell their products. They are targeting women because it is a brand for underwear, bras, and lingerie. However, they are specifically targeting full-figured women to rival the campaigns by Victoria Secret. The commercial is focused on