Stereotypes Of Women

Advertisements are a crucial part of mass media and for the television industry. The main use of advertisements is selling products. The problem however with these advertisements is how they represent women, the images used show what the ideal woman and her body should look like. The use of a woman’s body in advertisements can be seen as commodification, as it attracts and sells to a large audience. As advertising has a big influence on society, I will explore how women are represented by advertisements, focusing on the western culture. The advertisements I will use are shown below, as one can see there are not only modern advertisements but also some from the past, to show that body shaming has existed for a very long time already.

First

“Under capitalism, corporations will do anything to make a buck, including forcing girls and women to suffer health problems, low self-esteem, depression and the adoption of subservient roles in society.” - Jessica Moore 2002. It seems as if the only objective of the world today is to make money and it doesn’t matter how they do it. When beautiful and young women are shown using a certain product, the women in society will want to buy these products as they think they may look like that model one day. It also seems as if these companies showing these adverts want to create a ‘perfect’ society, where everybody is skinny, young and healthy. In order to gain the audience’s attention these companies send out more explicit content, which tends to be more violent or as in this case more sexual. The problem however is that everybody can see these adverts as there is no sort of mediation. Young children can see these pictures as well and grow up with these constant perceptions, which is shaping their minds, on the way they should see the world and having a great impact on their

The question that will be discussed in this paragraph will be: How were women depicted in advertisements from the past? Between the 1900s and 1980s, curves were seen as sexy and skinny girls were seen as very fragile and as one advertisement described didn’t “Have oomph!”. These adverts showing curvy women were published in magazines and newspapers as nowadays they mostly depict skinny women. The adverts from the past state that being thin, which many women aspire to be today, does not make you happy and can lead to being excluded. An example of one of these advertisements is advert number three shown at the end of this written task. The slogan itself already says it all, when you are skinny no man will want you. “Men wouldn’t look at me when I was skinny.” but since she gained ten pounds she has all the dates she wants. This advertisement is clearly encouraging women to gain weight in order to be happy. They even sold products to gain weight ‘safely’, as can be seen in the fourth advert from Wate-On which promises to give women natural curves and ‘healthy flesh’. In this one a curvy woman is shown as well. However these adverts exclude the skinny women and actually discriminize them as most curvy women are