Gone too far
Has it gone too far? The desire to want to buy the clothes that one would want to take off another. The corruption of American popular culture in mass media advertisements has turned into sexually objectifying men but especially women, like the company American Apparel does this in their advertisements. Why is it the “norm” to teach young girls to be “men’s women”.
Fashion Advertising is a huge industry for using a lot of creativity in their ad making. The fashion industry like American Apparel goes a little further in their ads to make their statements stand out from the rest of their competitors. The unrealistic view, this is trying to portray isn’t just seen in one age group but all ages. Making it seem okay to just live life
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This ad by American Apparel shows a woman figure in a tight fitting, flashy red dress with her bum cheeks sticking out from a man’s leg lifting up the dress, no humanistic qualities in either sex just a body of a female on her knees and man’s leg and foot, but no faces. Being a young girl growing up in today’s society is much different than it was a few decades ago. The unrealistic images seen in American popular culture, in mass media and advertisements like billboards or television commercials are giving false hope and teaching the youth that one has to look perfect to be noticed. Being perfect has so much attached to it, one must have the perfect body, right hair and clothes, keep them closed but don’t be a prude. Media is teaching younger generations that being a Men’s Women is okay, from females in ads being portrayed as physically attractive slim, young, and revealing clothing. What should be taught to all ages is that being true to yourself is the meaning of …show more content…
Jake Solomon said it well “For the semiotician, the contradictory nature of the American myth equality is nowhere written so clearly as in the signs of American Advertisers use to manipulate us into buying their ware” (167). It is to hook the consumer in, that is why advertisers sexualizes the product because sex sells. The consumers are at fault for buying into these ridiculous advertising campaigns and the companies are at fault for allowing it. It is not just the adult eye that sees it, the youth is included in this because mass media is everywhere we
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
The stereotypical images that we see in the media in regards to gender only serve to maintain inequality and discrimination. In movies, music videos, books, and other forms of media, we see images that perpetuate the ideals of hegemonic femininity and masculinity. In DuCille’s piece, Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference, there was an immense dialogue on the commodification of difference. She mentions that “although Barbie dolls come in a virtual rainbow coalition of colors, races, ethnicities, and nationalities” they quite often are “modified only by a dash of color and a change of costume” (1994, 51) to resemble the original white Barbie. This “modification,” is what really got me thinking. The commodification of difference is simply a modification of a product or idea to sell more of it based on the demographics of the consumer. Not only are these ideals projected by the people who create this commodification of difference, but also consumers buying into hegemonic femininity and masculinity work as a tool to help products and ideas sell. If Americans are caught up in the ideals of hegemonic masculinity and femininity, they become a mere mindless follower of the consumer cycle. Americans feed into ideas and conceptions of ideal femininity and masculinity that in the end cause
We see the ways that the popular media uses gender tensions everywhere. The truth is that sex sells, we know that. The challenge that advertisers face is: How to use it best. Some advertisers do this better than others and the ones that truly have an understanding of gender tensions will, in the end, sell the most. In my last paper, I explored how the company Abercrombie and Fitch uses gender tensions to sell their clothes. They have become among the masters in advertising and the business in booming. They cater to young adults and young adults only for one powerful reason: It is at this age in which the sexual tensions between male and female are greatest. Abercrombie and Fitch has found their niche.
Advertisements are everywhere. Rosewarne reveals that “In both a workplace and a public space setting audiences are held captive to such images; and both sets of images work to masculinise space in a way that makes women feel excluded” (Rosewarne 314). Take beer advertisements as an example of this. Beer advertisements have been utilizing the female body to draw the interest of males for centuries. This materialization of women has been verified to not only have a discouraging effect on women, but an unfavorable effect on civilization. The purpose of these posters is to allure the male 's eyes to the model’s body and therefore to the beer planted in the background. These ads strive to make you subconsciously affiliate a charming woman with a bottle of beer. In theory, these posters should make a guy imagine that if he purchases a bottle of their beer, that one way or another there would be a model to go with it. This is unreasonable of course because a pretty woman does not emerge out of nowhere every time someone has a beer. In my opinion, advertisements like these portray women as sex symbols. The advertisers attempts to link their product with the female body, does not encourage women, but rather has an accidental effect of lower self esteem and confidence in women. Rosewarne summarizes the her stand on sexual harassment in public ads by
The concept of woman as property runs deeply in the history of advertising, and continues, despite many hopes that such ways of thinking are archaic and no longer apply to our society, especially after the feminist movement and constant fighting for equality. But no, women and their bodies continue to be hypersexualized in media and commodified for the masses to sell whatever they think will make the marginalized and alienated feel better about the damage society has done. This damage still exists and will continue to do so, unless these transgressions are acknowledged, and women’s bodies begin to be appreciated and respected. The question remains—can the markets do this? Can media be effective without utilizing what is considered to be social conventions to appeal to the
In Jean Kilbourne's documentary “Killing Us Softly 4”, she gives multiple detailed examples of advertisers making women a sexual object which leads to society dehumanizing the female species. As well as this, they are finding younger and thinner women to use, even photo-shopping their models to unrealistic body shapes; warping the average women's view of what she should look like. American Apparel's founder and CEO Dov Charney himself stated that he had worked hard to acquire the provocative image they have today and that he purposefully created ads that were “soaked in youth and sex” (Chauduri). The company insists that they are simply “open about sexuality” and should not be persecuted for it (Chauduri). While sex is more prominent and less taboo than it has been in society, there is a definite line between more “open” about sexuality, and abusing the sexual side of men and women. By “open about sexuality” Dov Charney and American Apparel actually mean that they are going use extremely young women in promiscuous positions to sell their clothing, despite the fact that the...
Everyday, people are exposed to countless advertisements, whether people see these advertisements on a billboard, a commercial, a magazine, or a pop-up on a computer; advertisements surround modern day society. Because advertisements are found almost everywhere, they are a technique to show people how to live a ‘normal life’, they tell people what their beliefs and attitude should be focused on. People learn subconsciously that if they own a certain product then they will be viewed the same way as the person that was used in the advertisement. And who do these companies use to sell their products? These companies use the idea of sex to sell a product. Commercials prove that women can sell almost any product even when the product has nothing to do with the woman in the commercial. Because men who can have a woman by their side, turns into a subconscious symbol of power. People are continually found stuck in their roles that society has already engraved for them. Society tells us that women have to be seen as the sex symbol, she has to be weak and vulnerable; she pretends to not have a brain and she never speaks up. The man has to be the breadwinner, he has to be powerful and stronger than everyone else around him. Where does society find these stereotypes encouraged? Society finds them through advertisements. Advertisements objectify and dehumanize women which has hurt women physically and psychologically to men and women.
“You can’t be what you can’t see” (Siebel). In today’s society one gets their many standards of how they should look, act, and talk from the media. The media is setting these standards and instead of putting out unrealistic ideals of beauty for children, they should be encouraging more positive and realistic ideals. If it’s not on television or in the magazines, young children especially, can’t attempt to copy it. The first form of media to look at is advertisements. “U.S. advertisers spent billions of dollars in 2009. 80% of countries in the world have GDP’s less than what was spent” (Missrepresentation). It’s obvious that consumerism is a large aspect of American culture. Advertisements consume Americans lives. No matter where one goes these ads follow. In magazines, on television, radios, billboards litter the highways. There’s always something screaming “Buy me” or “Be like me”. The problem at hand is not women being sexy. It’s okay for a woman to want to be or look sexy; it’s the hyper-sexualization of women ...
“Sex sells” is an aphorism closely adhered to by both the film and print advertising industries. For over a century, magazines, newspapers, film, and other advertising mediums have utilized women and sexuality to persuasively market their products to consumers (Reichert, 2003). By representing an assortment of consumer products surrounded by women who exemplify a “desired” body type, marketing specialists quickly discovered the direct correlation between sexuality and consumer buying. So why is using beauty and sexuality as a marketing gimmick so harmful? With women being the primary audience of both general interest and consumer product magazines there is constant exposure to the idealistic body image that advertisers and mass media believe women should adhere to.
Open up any magazine and you will see the objectification of women. The female body is exploited by advertising, to make money for companies that sell not just a product, but a lifestyle to consumers. Advertisements with scantily clothed women, in sexualized positions, all objectify women in a sexual manner. Headless women, for example, make it easy to see them as only a body by erasing the individuality communicated through faces, eyes, and eye contact. Interchangeability is an advertising theme that reinforces the idea that women, like objects, are replaceable. But sexual objectification is only the tip of the iceberg. In society's narrative, subject and object status is heavily gendered, with men granted subject status most of the time, and women severely objectified. The difference between subject status and object status is simple; a subject is active, and an object is passive. These messages...
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
To sum up, it is often said that advertising is shaping women gender identity, and some have been argued that the statement is true, because of the higher amount of sexual references of women that advertisement show and the damages that occur on women’s personality and the public negative opinions of those women. As well, the negative effects that those kinds of advertisements cause to young generations and make them feel like they should simulate such things and are proud of what they are doing because famous actors are posting their pictures that way. Others deem this case as a personal freedom and absolutely unrelated to shaping women gender identity. On the contrast, they believe that, those sorts of advertisements are seriously teaching women how to stay healthy and be attractive, so they might have self-satisfaction after all.
The industry sells its good through 3 channels and their sales with the market share:
In 2013, the American woman can vote, be the CEO of a business, start her own company, and wear pants. Many would say that a woman has the exact same rights as a man in today’s society- and is treated the same as well. However, in addition to glaring economical evidence provided through data stating that women still earn 77 cents to every man’s dollar (Basset, HuffingtonPost.com), we find that women are still entrapped socially- by sexualisation and objectification of them. Sexualising and objectifying women in advertisements leads to the de-humanisation of them.
As marketing strategies have evolved, they have enhanced the ability of advertisers to communicate to the "masses" more effectively than ever before. This ability has allowed advertisers to not only reach more markets, but to be more influential in the decision making process of the audience. American society, especially young women, is being influenced by advertisers more now than in previous generations. It is not by accident that teenagers and young adults are targeted by advertisers, especially since their purchasing power as a group exceeds that of any other consumer group. Not only have advertisers learned to identify specific products that appeal to men and women, but they have also found that the "want" of the consumer can be turned into a "need" for the advertised product. Many of the beauty product companies advertise their products as a "need" which ultimately appeals to a vast majority of women.