Despite much progress in the area of women’s rights sexism is still highly prevalent in advertising and the media. Women’s bodies are used to sell everything from hamburgers to jeans to cologne. In a Carl’s Jr. commercial a blonde woman in a bikini is show “sexily” eating a hamburger. American Apparel uses sexual imagery of women (see Fig. 1) to sell their clothes whereas men are just shown wearing the clothes normally (see Fig. 2). In movies and TV shows women are portrayed as pretty, dumb and useless or ugly, smart and bitchy, they wait around for the male protagonist to save the day, they search for their one true love that will make their life whole, they undermine other women to get the guy, men go out and save the world, go on adventures, kick the bad guys ass. Men are seen as whole people, women are seen as a conglomeration of sexual objects. According to Laci Green sexual objectification is defined as “the viewing of people solely as de-personalized objects of desire instead of individuals with complex personalities and desires/plans of their own” or in other words a thing or object to have sex with. And this is how many women are seen in today’s media and advertising. Advertisements often use women’s bodies to sell everything from burgers to jeans to cologne. Green continues on to point out …show more content…
In the 1950s women were often depicted as housewifes that were weak, silly and subservient to their husbands (see Fig. 3). Now women are mostly depicted as sexual objects that are there to be ogled by men. Carl’s Jr.’s new Super Bowl ad features Charlotte McKinney, a Guess model, walking through a farmer’s market apparently naked proclaiming her love of going “all natural” while her chest, butt, and genitals are blocked from view with strategically placed fruits and vegetables. Scott Bixby points out