The Blazer is a woman who does not rely on her body to get by, or to obtain her goals in life. She knows that she can rely on more than just the way her body looks to be able to achieve success. She is self-motivated and self-directed, is work oriented, and is a woman who is both fancy and classy, making her attire appropriate both for work and a night out. She is the kind of person to be at the top of her class, because she knows what she wants out of life and is willing to work hard to acquire it. She knows that even when she is faced with obstacles, she will be able to adapt to the situation and overcome them. Her main goal in life is to be a successful woman in the work place, but she is able to balance this with her social and personal life. Although she is very focused on establishing and maintaining a career, she knows how to carry herself in a way that is appealing to potential employers as well as to acquaintances. The Blazer is always determined, devoted, and enthusiastic about new jobs and challenges. Since she is focused on her goals, these challenges appeal to her, and she persists even when they prove to be difficult. Even though she relies on her inner abilities to succeed, she knows that it is necessary to portray herself in a professional way in order to succeed. This is why she is called the blazer. With her practical clothes and her fashionable style, she presents these traits to those around her. She represents the working class female in a way that is a positive influence for younger women who also strive for a life in which they can stand on their own two feet. The Blazer knows that for school and work it is important to be able to show others that they are serious about where they are headed in lif...
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...f any obstacles that they might face along the way. By showing that she can have the brains as well as the looks, she encourages young women to try harder to attend high class schools and to understand that with a little bit of extra work they can make it to the top of their area of work. Many women can see this as a trend that can help them achieve anything that they put their minds to. She can increase the amount of women applying for universities and jobs by inspiring them to do more than stay at home as housewives. And though the targeted audience knows that looks aren’t everything, they also know that the image they portray is extremely important in the work environment. Everyone knows that when you look good, you feel good, and having a positive state of mind is always helpful to better your chances of finding a healthy balance in all areas of your life.
First, Kilbourne’s research should be praised tremendously for bringing to light the unhealthy impression of true beauty in today’s culture. Kilbourne challenges the audience to reconsider their viewpoints on advertising that is sublime with sexual language. The evolution of advertising and product placement has drastically changed the real meaning of being a woman. According to the movie, every American is exposed to hundreds and thousands of advertisements each day. Furthermore, the picture of an “ideal women” in magazines, commercials, and billboards are a product of numerous computer retouching and cosmetics. Media creates a false and unrealistic sense of how women should be viewing themselves. Instead of being praised for their femininity and prowess, women are turned into objects. This can be detrimental to a society filled with girls that are brainwashed to strive to achieve this unrealistic look of beauty.
This is a stereotype, which has been engraved into heads of men, women, and children. By plastering the world with models who seem to have it the genetic jackpot, Dove set out to discredit this cultural cast created by our society. Body image, to some people, is the first part of a person they notice. A study conducted by Janowsky and Pruis compared body image between younger and older women. They found that although older women “may not feel the same societal pressure as younger women to be thin and beautiful…some feel that they need to make themselves look as young as possible” (225). Since women are being faced with pressure to conform in ways that seem almost impossible, Jeffers came to the conclusion “they should create advertising that challenges conventional stereotypes of beauty” (34) after conducting various interviews with feminist scholars. The stance of Figure 1’s model screams confident. She is a voluptuous, curvy and beautiful women standing nearly butt-naked in an ad, plastered on billboards across the globe. Ultimately, she is telling women and girls everywhere that if I can be confident in my body, so can you. Jessica Hopper reveals, “some feel that the ads still rely too heavily on using sex to sell” (1). However, I feel as if these are just criticisms from others who are bitter. With the model’s hands placed assertively placed on her hips, her smile lights up the whole ad. She completely breaks the stereotype that in order to
Being a curvaceous young woman is hard enough. Especially when you’re trying to find love, you’re seeking approval and anticipating a better future for yourself. The film Real Women Have Curves stresses how important higher education is to a Mexican-American teenager and the wrath she endures from her mother because of her weight and aspiration. Mark Twain stated that, “Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great” (http://thinkexist.com/quotation/keepaway_from_those_who_try_to_belittleyour/215215.html). I believe I can personally relate to Real Women Have Curves, the reason being is because I’m a daughter, I’m overweight, and I’m seeking a post-secondary education. This is a synopsis of Real Women Have Curves; I’ll reveal why the film is so inspiring to me, I’ll give feedback from movie reviews, and I’ll use documents from my course’s textbook, to fully develop my ideas.
The once male dominated, corporate, "white collar" America has seen a phenomenal influx of women within the last thirty years. Although a female lawyer, physician, or CEO is no longer considered a rarity in our times, women still face quite a deal of oppression in comparison to their male counterparts. In retrospect, some professions have always been controlled by women, and men have not made a noticeable advance in these fields. In 1970, finding a female lawyer to represent you would be a difficult task, since less than five percent of the profession were women. Today, that number has risen to almost thirty percent. The percentage of female doctors has almost tripled in the course of thirty years. African Americans have not made such a conspicuous progression within the last fifty years, while women have made a tremendous impact on the corporate world. One may wonder, how did women make these extraordinary advances? For the most part, it is due to the education they receive. At the present time young girls are encouraged to enroll in classes dealing with math and science, rather than home economics and typing. As pointed out by Nanette Asimov, in her essay "Fewer Teen Girls Enrolling in Technology Classes", school officials are advocating the necessity of advanced placement, and honor classes for teenage girls, in both the arts and sciences. This support and reassurance than carries over onto college, and finds a permanent fixture in a woman’s life. While women are continuing their success in once exclusively male oriented professions, they are still lacking the respect and equality from their peers, coworkers, and society. The average male lawyer, and doctor make twenty-five percent more money than their female equivalent. Women have always lived with the reputation of being intellectually inferior to, and physically submissive to men. This medieval, ignorant notion is far fetched from the truth. In 1999, high school men and women posted similar SAT scores, being separated by a only a few points. In addition to posting similar scores on the SAT, the average males score was a mere two-tenths of a point higher than an average females score on the ACT. Even though a woman maybe as qualified as a male for a certain occupation , women receive unwanted harassment, and are under strict scrutiny. A good illustration of this would be the women represented in "Two Women Cadets Leave the Citadel.
Cover Girl cosmetics have been the top-seller since 1961 and are still going strong. It is hard, with all the advanced lines of make-up for one product to go as far as Cover girl has, so how does Cover Girl cosmetics do it? A lot of Cover Girl’s strong, on going successes are due to changing the look of the product, exceptional promotions which the public can’t look over, giving a cosmetic appeal to both older and younger aged women and most importantly by using near perfect women and teens to model their products. Although it’s wonderful that Cover Girl has been and still is so successful, it has put a dentation in today’s society in what women’s appearance should and shouldn’t be. Women and young adolescence are confused of what their appearance should be. Cover Girl has many famous models; one inparticular is the famous country singer Faith Hill. Faith is tall, skinny, and flawless. When women see models like her doing the advertising for Cover Girl, they automatically feel that they should look the same. Later in this paper I will go into semiotics which derives from the Greek word semeion meaning sign, it basically describes how people interpret different signs, such as models, and how these signs might effect one’s life and self-esteem. Proctor & Gamble are the owners and starters of Cover Girl cosmetics. To keep up the success of Cover Girl they must keep on top of the advertising game to stay above the competitors. To do this they do many promotions, some include using famous singers, changing displays, giving away samples and one of the most important advertisement of all is the models Cover Girls incorporates in their ads. Cover Girls did one promotion with Target stores to promote their product. They used the famous group 98 Degrees to make a sweepstakes called, “Fall in Love with 98 Degrees Sweepstakes.” The grand prizewinner of this sweepstakes is an appearance in the new 98 Degrees music video. This advertising doesn’t just take place in the Target stores; it also takes place in Teen magazine, stickers on the new 98 Degrees CDs, a national radio campaign, and the national Teen People magazine. Because it’s teens that mainly listen to the music that 98 Degrees produces, it’s the teens that this particular promotion is focused on. I s...
... be viewed and represented. It is difficult to believe that they want to be understood as smart bright women when they appear so artificial and vain. Pretty looks can only take a woman so far before she must rely on her intelligence and skills. From their apparel to their body language to their facial expressions, women are constantly being examined by the public, and moreover by men. It is a cause and effect relationship since men looking at women makes women feel like objects, which in return makes them want to become like pieces of toys for men to stare at and play with. Sanders and Cunningham make it apparent that women are much more than their appearance, and have a lot more to offer than a provocative picture or a plastic smile. However, it is up to the women to change the way they portray themselves to the world if they want to be seen in a different light.
Barbara White, author of Women’s Career Development, gives an opportunity for successful women to give advice to other women wanting to pursue a career in the workforce. First, they explained that women need to be single-minded today. They must make their own choices and know what they want. If a woman hopes to achieve her goal of an ‘American Dream’ and live up to it, then she should be persistent and keep working at achieving her objectives. The best advice given in White’s book is that a woman should not underestimate herself (227-229). A woman today can be whatever she pleases. It takes work, dedication and persistence to achieve goals in general, not just in the career aspect of life. As seen through Joan Crawford and Dawn Steel’s stories, a ‘business woman’ has a bright future now and for years to come. Women’s roles have drastically changed throughout the past century along with the actual number of women now working. It is phenomenal to see such an increase in women’s participation, and hopefully this course will continue even higher into the twenty-first century.
...the images of women are presented through technology. Women can easily access negative images through technological aspects. Advertisements, the internet, celebrities and other technology present women in sexualized and demeaning manners. Showing women in positive manners can shift the negative image of women and empower their role in society.
It only leads them to another types of level of sexism as Cudd and Jones refer to it as “Institutional sexism”. When a women wants to get a job, the standards for them are set pretty high. For example if a women wants to get a job as model, then they must be a size 0 in order to achieve that type of job. As simple as if a women wants a job at hooters, then they have to meet a certain criteria of what a “hooters waitress” looks like. For a while the restraunt would even base their final decision on the appreance of the women applying for Hooters. It is unfair that a women is judged on their appearance and not on their performance. Although sexism doesn’t seem like it it’s going on anymore, it really is. Women are pressured by society to learn and act a certain way, and even if they don’t really want to they do it anyways because they would rather “fit in”, than being a
I would like to begin with the fact that women have always been known to dedicate their time to beauty. Those who are devoted to their appearance most often believe that beauty brings power, popularity, and success. Women believe this, because they grow up reading magazines that picture beautiful women in successful environments; not to mention they are popular models and world famous individuals. Beautiful women are no longer just a priority for most advertising, but we have become a walking target for the working class employers. It is documented that better-looking attorneys earn more than others after five years of practice, which was an effect that grew with experience (Biddle, 172). We cannot overlook the fact that it is always the most popular and most beautiful girl who becomes homecoming-queen or prom-queen. While these are possible positive effects of the "beauty myth," the negative results of female devotion to beauty undercut this value. These effects are that it costs a lot of money, it costs a lot of time, and in the long run, it costs a lot of pain.
The campaign has certainly yielded the results it set out to accomplish. However, the long term effects of this marketing strategy remain to be seen. Will younger women or women who believe in the supermodel definition of beauty be attracted to the brand? Society’s definition may not change even though women feel more confident. Beauty is subjective and cannot be applied to an entire group. Women might feel more confident but that may not make them any more beautiful in the eyes of society which might cause the whole message to
It has shown that this career is hard for women to pursue because they have to choose between having a family or having a good career, they must have to handle extreme stress while working, and that there is sexism because this industry is dominated by males. There have been women who have been able to overcome these challenges, so this shows that even though there are hard challenges in this industry, they can be
The concept of “beauty” is something that everyone feels, thinks, or wants, in order to fit society’s standards. In today’s society, we are often faced with the unrealistic ideals of what beauty is. Due to society’s constant portraying of unrealistic beauty ideals, this reinforces a negative influence upon women’s idea of beauty, resulting in a negative impact in their confidence, and self-esteem, which leads to others, specifically women to be manipulated by society’s corrupted outlook of what beauty is. To add onto this issue, we are constantly surrounded by sources of this negative influence in our everyday lives, including magazines, television, advertisements, and so on. However, women specifically, are more prone to be victims of this negative effect, thus will have more pressure upon themselves to match society’s idea of “beauty,” which includes unrealistic and sometimes unattainable beauty standards. Women especially, can sometimes be so deeply manipulated by society’s unrealistic ideals of what is beautiful, such that it’s possible that they don’t even realize it Furthermore, in order to do so, women often will receive negative impacts rather than positive impacts, such as in their confidence and self-esteem. The negative effects of society’s beauty ideals also lead women to have an overall corrupted idea of what is “beautiful.” Society creates unrealistic ideals of beauty towards women through the media by creating an unrealistic image of what women should look like to be considered beautiful. Men negatively affect women’s idea of beauty by using the unrealistic beauty standards exposed by society which further pressures women to try to fit society’s idea of what is beautiful. Beauty pageants negatively affect women’s ov...
The media favors one women's body type; the tall blonde with perfect, tan skin and long, beautiful hair. Because the images of women in advertisements are unattainable, it keeps them purchasing new products in their quest to be like the models they see (Moore). The actual women in these advertisements can't even match up to the