How To Sexualize Women In Advertising

The mass media of advertising places a great distribution on the consumption of gender identity. Advertising is a complex form of mass communication used to persuade consumer goods to the public, but this is certainly not the only case. Advertising also plays a huge role towards the operation of gender identification, social values, and attitudes. The institution of advertising lacks the essential knowledge on the actual goods and resources (Dyer, 2008). Throughout the representation of the advertising media, women have been consistently displayed as passive objects towards the male gaze. Yet, within the contemporary representation of a patriarchal society, women now appear to have more sexually internalized views on their own agentic sexualisation.

Although we are living in a post-feminist era where advertisement depicts women as being active, independent and powerful. According to Gill (2008), there are still ongoing sexist advertisements towards objectifying and sexualizing women bodies. The contemporary illustration of women as sexual agentic in advertisements has caused challenging issues towards feminist movement. It has created political and social problems by redefining the concept of Feminism. In other words, it is trying to tap into the idea of feminism as a challenging power on women who have power now by using the rhetoric against the long-standing form of visual media in women's body parts, it is actually taking the politics out of feminism. The concept “Feminism” becomes depoliticized as the advertising media turns to the approach of “feminist social goals to individual lifestyle” (Goldman et al., 1991). Within the contemporary advertising industry, Feminism is now attached to the idea of femininity. Feminism is now put into a position of commodity and language, it no longer follows the original definition of fighting against unequal social, political and economic

According to Kilbourn in the video “Killing Us Softly”, advertising since the 1970s has picked up the rhetoric of feminist movement and depoliticize it to sell products (Jhally et al., 2010). Feminism in modern advertising is heavily valued towards the ideologies of being sexually attractive. It opposes the significances origins of Feminism as a movement on social, political and economic rights of sex equality (Goldman et al., 1991). There is no significant development from the entrepreneurs trying to allocate advertisements towards the social movement. Instead, they transformed the meaning of feminism into symbolic currency as assumptions for business (Goldman et al., 1991). This means that they are using the concept of feminism on women as a way of making money. Within contemporary advertisements, the exploitation of women still remains to serve the idea of a sexist image through objectifying their skin and body. However, instead of fully sexualizing the image of women’s body with no explanation. Women who show their skin and body is now promoted with products through the marketing strategies. One example of this is the advertisement from Infusium23, displaying a half naked women in a business environment towards the promotion of hair products (See Figure 1) (Duske, 2016). Another example of this is the advertisement from Stuart Weitzman,