Analysis Of Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt By Kilbourne

Essay 4 Draft The life of models has always looked so glamorous; that’s the point. Girls and women are supposed to aspire to look and live like them, and boys and men are supposed to aspire to date them. However, many of these girls’s dreams are crushed when they are nonchalantly told that they can not be a model if they expect to eat ice cream everyday like they already do, or if they are only 5 foot 4 and they are told that models have to be taller than that to even be considered for the job. Teenage boys get their dreams crushed when they realize that only star athletes and wealthy men get to date what’s considered the prettiest people in the world. This has to make us question why all the advertisements today feature these types of people:

The Axe body wash advertisement plays into these boys’s thoughts and implies that using their product will get them girls. These boys see this ad and think that they have to buy it because they have to appear masculine and heterosexual to all their guy friends around them. “The boys have also learned that men ogle primarily to impress other men (and to affirm their heterosexuality)” (Kilbourne 468) is a quote that reaffirms the idea that Axe made their advertisement with the intent to help these boys impress other men and confirm their sexuality rather than buy it because the product is better than others or more useful than other company’s similar products. Blum, the writer of the article “Gender Blur” scientifically backs Kilbourne’s point. She states that testosterone, which is seven to ten times as more in men than females, influences behavior such as sex drive (Blum 6). The primary focus of this Axe advertisement is the female. She is what the company wants the viewer’s eye to be drawn towards. In the advertisement, the young woman shown is not seen as a person. She is seen as the consumer’s reward for using their product. The guy in the shower and the woman with the whipped cream show no connection, but instead it makes it

This advertisement’s intended audience is men ranging in the ages of 30’s and 40’s. In order to get this age group’s attention, the advertisement uses a fact that Blum discussed in her article, which is that testosterone rises in the competitive world of dating and settles down with a stable and supportive relationship (Blum 6). The Dove men’s deodorant advertisement takes into consideration this fact about testosterone, and caters to the preferred audience’s likely testosterone level by showing the man smiling with a child. The man is also wearing a wedding ring, and altogether this scene implies that he is in a healthy relationship with both his wife and child. The viewer seeing this relates to the advertisement and makes his purchase of the product based off of a simple placement of a man smiling at and holding a child. However, the advertisement still acknowledges that there is more testosterone than females in the consumers that they are trying to attract. The words “Tough on sweat, not on skin” put next to the scene of the father and son are bolded as opposed to the words that are more informative about the product. This adds to the ideas brought up by Blum about violence and an in-your-face attitude being more likely among men because they have more testosterone. In a Dove women’s deodorant advertisement you never see the word ‘tough’ but instead words like ‘soft’ and ‘smooth’. Men,