The Perpetuation of Female Stereotypes

Images are all around us, and while some are helpful many can destroy the image that is our existence. These negative images are projected at us through media, and the media is all around us, making it at the very least difficult if not impossible to ignore them. A great analysis of the effect of these negative images on young women is a film titled Beyond Killing Us Softly. The third in a series of films on the advertising industry, body image, and women, Beyond Killing Us Softly is a 30-minute documentary that explores the question of how adolescent girls interpret the confusing, conflicting, and sexist messages they get from the media. Featuring feminist activists and scholars including Carol Gilligan, Amy Richards, Gloria Steinem, and Gail Dines, the film goes beyond calling girls "victims," and shows them interacting with potentially harmful messages and resisting the call to victim hood. This documentary calls attention to the harmful images with which we are faced with daily. Images such as a recent ad from Style magazine show how our media subtly impose standards of femininity, materialism, and vulnerability in order to be considered sexy.

America dictates standards of femininity upon the masses, in turn forcing one image as being the only way a woman can be beautiful. The media screams twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week through television, newspapers, magazines, billboards and many more, and our society is structured in such a way that we appear powerless in its wake. We are slapped with images of tiny, skinny women and told to be like that with their advertisements. They leave us with a feeling of, "Look like this, or die trying." The ad found in Style magazine, for Pepe Jeans, is a typical demonstration of t...

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...st Gail Dines lectures a group of youth, and we have to keep all of this in consideration. Are we, as women and consumers, going to let advertisers have the power to portray sexy women as only being blonde, skinny, white, powerless, and vulnerable? The way women are portrayed in this and other ads is unacceptable; letting our young women grow up in a society which leaves them no alternative than to develop eating disorders and develop self-loathing We need to stand up against these companies that advocate these ads to be run, we need to take action against the mediums in which they are run. We need to protect ourselves and buy products that are represented the way that we want them to be. It's time for the American marketing industry to wake up to what's important, the lives of its young girls, and leave the greed of the money market by projecting these images behind.