Many advertisement have found the key part into selling a product is through "sex" because they know sex will sell. Susan Bordo, a philosopher, write an essay piece on how the male bodies are presented as objects of pleasure and exchange of commerce. Usually, it would be women who are presented as objects of pleasure, but in this particular essay the script is flipped. Susan Bordo focus on how women react to men in the media, how men was seen in sexy advertisements and how homosexuality had an influence on it. These advertisement images are brought to life by brand names like Calvin Klein, Gucci, and Versace. In Susan Bordo's "Beauty (re)discovers the male body" she uses rhetorical strategies persuasively to argue that the male bodies are being exposed and objectified in a similar way to the female body. Susan Bordo, a philosopher, the Otis A. Singletary Chair of Humanities at the University of Kentucky. Bordo has background training in the study of culture, including popular culture and its representation of the body. Bordo intended audience was a broad group of people. Her audience would consist of people of any gender who are aware of advertisement selling products through sex. No, Bordo does not show proper audience awareness. The readers are prone to use context clues and the information to paint a clear picture of who is Bordo audience. As recently mention, Bordo's purpose for writing is present her argument about the exposure and objectification of the male body as opposed to the female body in the media. In Bordo essay, she introduces her ethos through personal stories, her own opinion, and data polls. Bordo credibility is well equipped throughout her essay, and writing on subject she shows passion towards. Bordo acknowled...
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... think of them. Bordo used ads in her argument to support her claim. The ads she used were real ads that had been in magazines. She includes these different supports because some of her reader might not have prior knowledge on different cultural history. The argument consist of quotes that are reliable, so the message of her argument is well comprehensive. Bordo's whole demeanor for writing this essay was well organized. The exposure and objectification of the male body as opposed to the female body in the media was her overall purpose of writing. She taught her reader that presenting men as sexual object brought major sells to the advertisement industry. These advertisements caught to not only the attention of women but homosexual female and men. Her audience are able to see that challenging men sexuality in advertisement really question how real of a men they are.
This thought has been held on for far too long. In a consumer-driven society, advertisements invade the minds of every person who owns any piece of technology that can connect to the internet. Killbourne observes that “sex in advertising is pornographic because it dehumanizes and objectifies people, especially women,” (271). Advertising takes the societal ideology of women and stereotypes most kids grow up learning and play on the nerves of everyone trying to evoke a reaction out of potential customers, one that results in them buying products.
Thus, we can assume that the audience itself, the members who believe in the content of ads and its sincerity, as well as, people who agree with the portrait of the women that is being created are the only prisoners in this particular situation. “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Plato 868). On the other hand, according to the Jean Kilbourne, author of “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt” what is not mention to the public is the fact, that many women from the very young age during the process of finding out the truth and being blinded by the “light” are fighting with depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders and sexual harassment. “I contend that all girls growing up in this culture are sexually abused – abused by the pornographic images of female sexuality that surround them from birth, abused by all the violence against woman and girls, and abused by the constant harassment and threat of violence” (Kilbourne
In Susan Bordo’s “Beauty (Re)discover The Male Body, she uses advertisement as a form of her argument on how we observe images through the views of the female and male body in advertisement. Also, the many assumption we come across in Bordo’s argument is how the female and male body is objectified in a sexual content in advertisement that has an effect on how we view the portrayed images. Bordo’s rhetorical strategies were employed effectively throughout her argument. She formatted her essay by the use of ethos and logos, so her reader had a clear understanding on how learning assumption cause portrayal of images. There are a host of different quotes she cites in her work to make it logical, and that her message is being comprehended. For example, “...I knew women legs were supposed to be sexy. I had learned that from all those hose- straightening scenes in movies. But men legs? Who had ever seen a woman gaga over some guy’s leg in the movie?” (Bordo 191). This comes to show that we are taught to think women legs are sexy, and that men legs are not seen as sexy until they started being objectified. We...
In “Beauty… and the Beast of Advertising” Jean Kilbourne argues that advertisements sell a lot more than just their products: “They sell values, images, and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy” (1). Kilbourne states that in advertising there are two types of women, “Housewives” and “Sex objects”. Kilbourne calls the sexually objectified women “a mannequin, a shell” because their beauty is flawless, they lacks all of the imperfections that make people appear human (2). Kilbourne also states that these women are all skinny, often tall and “long-legged”, and youthful (2). She claims that all “beautiful” women in ads obey this “norm” (Kilbourne 2). Kilbourne strongly states that advertisements lack the sense
Advertisements are all over the place. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that you can escape them. They all have their target audience who they have specifically designed the ad for. And of course they are selling their product. This is a multi billion dollar industry and the advertiser’s study all the ways that they can attract the person’s attention. One way that is used the most and is in some ways very controversial is use of sex to sell products. For me to analyze this advertisement I used the rhetorical triangle, as well as ethos, pathos, and logos.
A person can be identified by many different characteristics such as, age, ethnicity, sex and gender. Although many people see sex and gender as meaning the same thing, they are very different. Sex is the anatomy of an individual 's reproductive system which refers to the biological and physiological characteristics of a male or female, while gender refers to masculine or feminine and the behaviors, roles, expectations and activities in society. The majority of people conform to gender roles very early on, but sometimes the line blurs between femininity and masculinity. Susan Bordo is an author who points out the cultural stereotypes about gender in her piece “Hunger as Ideology”. In this piece she analyzes advertisements from the Victorian
Accordingly, “pornography can be considered mainstream” (page 460, paragraph 1, line 5), said the author. However, there were problems brought up since the pornography glorify the violence and crimes, and it had no difficulties in being shown in mass media. Jean Kilbourne, though, did not place all the blame on advertising when she pointed out: “Ads don’t directly cause violence, of course. But the violent images contribute to the state of terror” (page 466, paragraph 2, line 1). Such erroneous attitudes are known to be existed as: “women are valuable only as objects of men’s desire, that real men are always aggressive, that violence is erotic, and that women who are the victims of sexual assault “ask for it”” (page 478, paragraph 5, line 2). The impact it made on women well-being is dreadful when it comes with them along their journey through life starting from being misbelieved as young to ending up with self
Bordo’s essay shows the way that women are constantly being bombarded with commercials. Advertisements portray the idea that you are what society envisions you being, if you don’t make a certain choice regarding to the kinds of food you eat, and the amount of food you eat. They say that if you don’t eat a certain kind of cereal, that you will be fat, or that you look unattractive eating that thick, burger, and instead, you should have some
This is the reason that marketing and advertisement have the biggest budgets in a business. This is the reason that places such as Amazon.com spend up to four million dollars on advertisement a year, according to 'Dream-Biz.com' written by Burke Hedges. There is a saying that goes 'Sex-sells' is this true? Most people would argue that it does. Since choosing this topic it has forced me to see everything different. When I sit and watch television I can?t help but notice all of the strong sexual messages that are being thrown at me every second. This project will touch on many venues of advertisement, from television to radio and even printed advertisement. It seems to me that sex is being used to sell everything. It has become custom to see promotions for a movie that would have a hot and seductive scene, or even in a music video; which have become short movies themselves. I feel that the use of sex in advertisement has gone a little too far, when sex is used to sell juice that?s were I draw the line.
It compares and contrasts the “physical view on masculinity” as it has changed over the centuries in relation to society’s views on it. In her article, Bordo explains, “Attention to beauty was associated not with femininity but with a life that was both privileged and governed by exacting standards… By the end of the nineteenth century, older notions of manliness premised on altruism, self-restraint, and moral integrity – qualities that women could have too – began to be understood as vaguely ‘feminine’… ‘Homosexual’ came to be classified as a perverse personality type which the normal, heterosexual male have to prove himself distinct from.” (402) Bordo goes on to explain how in the twentieth century the homosexual community has greatly influenced social discourse through developing the way models pose. In turn, this discourse has shaped the way male bodies are portrayed both in advertisements and within our culture, and broken the idea that all male bodies need to be portrayed in a strong and masculine fashion. In her article, Bordo uses a surfeit of anecdotes to typify pathos, several accounts of logos, and ethos to show the adaption that has taken place in the masculine advertising
In the essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” author and philosopher Susan Bordo discusses the history and current state of male representation in advertisements. While using her feminist background, Bordo compares and contrasts the aspects of how men and women are portrayed in the public eye. She claims that there has been a paradigm shift the media with the theory that not just women are being objectified in the public eye, but also men too. Since the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Calvin Klein commercials, men have started to become more dehumanized and regarded as sex symbols. In a similar fashion to how Bordo describes gender, race plays a similar role in the media. People of all different ethnicities and cultures are being categorized into an oversimplified and usually unfair image by the media over basic characteristics.
The portrayals of men in advertising began shifting towards a focus on sexual appeal in the 1980s, which is around the same that women in advertising were making this shift as well. According to Amy-Chinn, advertisements from 1985 conveyed the message that “men no longer just looked, they were also to be looked at” as seen in advertisements with men who were stripped down to their briefs (2). Additionally, advertisements like these were influencing society to view the male body “as an objectified commodity” (Mager and Helgeson 240). This shows how advertisements made an impact on societal views towards gender roles by portraying men as sex objects, similarly to women. By showcasing men and women in little clothing and provocative poses, advertisements influenced society to perceive men and women with more sexual
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 desirable thing in the ‘Far East’ and that beer is much more important than women. It also openly laughs at the South East Asian sex trade by putting a prostitute in the middle of the ad. The ad also implies that women in the ‘Far East’ are only good for sex (dressing in revealing, sexual clothes designed to make the woman in the ad seem more desirable).
Here in America, the conventional definition of beauty is what is perceptible in any form of our popular culture. This includes television, movies, music videos, billboards, fashion blogs, social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), as well as anything ran on print and in mainstream media. The business strategy that is often used in these forms of media is that, women’s bodies are often used as a tool for advertising products that are entirely not related to the items in play, for instance, fancy cars, liquor, as well as guns (Kitch 56). Much as utilizing women’s bodies as a tool for selling the products that are totally unrelated
In the capitalistic society, sexual objectification of women has become one of the most popular and effective ways of promoting a product. Female bodies are used in a lot of commercials. Not only do females reveal their body parts for the sake of ‘sex appeal’, they are often identified as a product itself, sometimes even regardless of the context.