Summary: The Sexualization Of Women In Advertising

The main concern of big corporations is making money. Companies use a vast amount of strategies in order to gain attention for their products. While many of these marketing strategies are acceptable and even ingenious other strategies drift along the line of indecency. Many businesses wrongly promote sexuality to sell their products.
Clothing retailers are forcing children to grow up too soon by sexualizing children’s clothing. If someone walked down an aisle for children’s clothing many of the selections would shock him/her. There has been a rise in girls’ clothing with 30 percent having sexual characteristics such as revealing cuts, suggestive sayings and even slinky material (Pappas). Retailers have push up bras for those barely in their

Most of the women used in advertisements are those with the so called “perfect body” and anyone who does not have that body is viewed as unattractive by society. In makeup commercials, companies show women caked in makeup, and these businesses basically tell consumers that women need makeup to be attractive to men. It can be difficult to keep in mind that the women in commercials had their makeup done by professions and not everyone is going to look like that. In the commercials for Axe body spray and deodorant you can see men being surrounded by beautiful women after using Axe. Axe tells men that if they use the body spray then they will get all these girls. The corporation is using women as sexual objects to get men to purchase their body spray. In the real world, women may find it hard to compete with these actresses and models for male attention. After seeing sexualized commercials, society develops unrealistic qualities defining beauty and women are forced to try and fit these impossible standards. Society has told women that it is attractive to be skinny, tan, and even to have blonde hair. Now women find themselves constantly worrying about their appearances. According to the American Psychological Association, Sexualization of women can also undermine a woman’s confidence to where she does not feel comfortable in her own skin and it can leave her with self-image problems like anxiety and even shame (“Sexualization of Girls…”). While trying to feel attractive, women have resorted to starving themselves to become skinny resulting in eating disorders. Another downfall of this idea is that when society objectifies women then women may, in the long run, objectify themselves. If a woman was to conform to society’s ideas of what is attractive, and say she is dressed in a sexual manner, then