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Media and body image in females blog
Media and body image in females blog
Media and its effects on body image
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Women are known to be beautiful people, but ads take the beautiful and makes it all sexual. Women aren’t treated as people they are used as objects, their bodies are turned into things, all for what the company
“Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt,” written by Jean Kilbourne, who is an award-winning author and educator, is best known for her lectures on the effects of media images on young people and specifically young women. In this essay, Kilbourne discusses the ways advertising constantly uses images that make sexual and violent situations against women and children increasingly normalized in our society. In order to support her argument, the essay is heavily filled with images of these particular advertisements that portray the sexual exploitation of women and children. Overall, the author uncovers that these advertisements do not promote self-love or confidence. In fact, these constant messages invoke self-hatred and open contempt among young women.
A lot of things have changed throughout the centuries. Advertisements are an everyday part of our lives, whether we look at them or not they still influence us and affect us in many ways. In many advertising, many large companies are using women in a sexual way for their advertising. And even TV shows are showing how a man is a leading character that can control women and their bodies. Ads give a message to men that if they buy their product, then they are going to have the same results as in the advertising.
Longaker and Walker identify how dehumanization effects emotion by discussing, “The Nazi pogrom, Jews were often made to do disgusting things—scrub toilets, relieve themselves publicly—to make them seem less than human and more deserving of cruel treatment and even mass extermination” (212). Similarly, advertisements can dehumanize individuals, like women, by portraying them in grotesque situations or environments. As a result, a society lessens respect for these individuals and creates a mentality that fosters abuse. Kilbourne tries to illuminate this issue by presenting various advertisements that are suggestive of women, and elaborates on the effects these advertisements have on society. For instance, alcohol companies tend to target women with advertisements like, “A chilling newspaper ad for a bar in Georgetown features a close-up of a cocktail and the headline, ‘If your date won’t listen to reason, try a Velvet Hammer’”
Dehumanization is the process through which someone asserts control and power, treating the person as an inanimate object with no dimension or surface; becoming an object means being acted upon rather than being the active subject. It is easier to be violent to someone who one already feels power over. Dehumanizing women and men is similar to pornography, where either violence or status (men over women) promotes “power over other” (Kilbourne 420). According to Jean Kilbourne in her essay, “‘Two Ways a Women Can Get Hurt’:Advertising and Violence”, advertisement is portraying women’s body as objects that both lead to dehumanization, violence, and mistreatment toward women. Considering the opposing characterization between males and females, femininity refers to submissiveness and vulnerability that is often depicted in advertisement.
“He's such an amazing actor,” said an old woman as a crowd of customers gathered around the counter. “My granddaughter was once in a play called Our Town. She was one of the dead people – Such a wonderful actress. She said she hated the director because she was her ex-girlfriend. A day later, they got back together to break up a day later.”
Advertisements: Exposed When viewing advertisements, commercials, and marketing techniques in the sense of a rhetorical perspective, rhetorical strategies such as logos, pathos, and ethos heavily influence the way society decides what products they want to purchase. By using these strategies, the advertisement portrayal based on statistics, factual evidence, and emotional involvement give a sense of need and want for that product. Advertisements also make use of social norms to display various expectations among gender roles along with providing differentiation among tasks that are deemed with femininity or masculinity. Therefore, it is of the advertisers and marketing team of that product that initially have the ideas that influence
This form of objectification is often used as a means to appeal to men's sexual desires in order to promote and attract consumers, because marketers still latch onto the old “sex sells”, or so it would seem (Rowland, 2016). Music videos, magazines, fashion commercials, are all channels through which women are exploited and put out to be headless objects isolated for their bodies solely for sexual pleasure and viewing purposes. Rowland explains that although this charade may allure and trap most men, this is not the case for women. Emma Rooney cites in The Effects of Sexual Objectification on Women's Mental Health, “the sexual objectification of women is a driving and perpetuating component of gender oppression, systemic sexism, sexual harassment, and violence against women”. Jessica Vanlenti writes in ‘Worldwide sexism…Women’, that researchers from The University of Missouri-Kanas and Georgia State found these forms of objectification to be linked to women’s psychological distress, and are leading causes of suicide among young adolescent women.
“Advertising contributes to people’s attitudes about gender, sex, and violence,” states Jean Kilbourne in her article, Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt With advertising agencies standing by the notion that “Sex Sells” it isn’t uncommon to find sex tied into a number of advertisements seen everywhere on a daily basis. “Sex in advertising is pornographic because it dehumanizes and objectifies people, especially women …” (Kilbourne, 271). The objectification of women in our society is more prevalent than many would like to believe. Women being portrayed as passive, easy, innocent, needy, submissive and dependent beings create an understanding that women are less human than men.
Advertisements sell values, images, love and sexuality. Over the years advertisements have attempted a wide variety of advertising approaches like humor, sex, emotions. Advertisers use one of these appeals to ensure that the targeted audiences receive their message. The media’s framing of women in highly restricted and negative ways is a global phenomenon that cuts across all cultures and has endured a long passage of
Girlhood is the period of a young girl’s life where she gets to decide what she likes, what she doesn’t like, and who she wants to be. This time is crucial because these decisions, whether progressive or regressive, will help her develop into to a teenager, and then a young woman. But girlhood is being heavily influenced by society’s popular culture, and this influence can prove to be positive or negative for young girls’ futures, as well as the spectating society. Perhaps the biggest and most negative influence on girlhood is the concept of sexualization. This concept can be applied to many aspects of girlhood, but merchandizing and consumerism will be discussed in this paper.
Sexualisation is to make something sexual in character or quality, or to become aware of sexuality, especially in relation to men and women. Sexualisation is linked to sexual objectification and has been dismissed by some as no more than yet another panic about youth and sex. Every day in magazines, television, movies etc. we are bombarded with images of the supposedly perfect body. These photo shopped beauties and hunks send most of us into a frenzy, however the sad truth is most of us will not look like this, but why do we have to abide by what society says is beauty.
Sexual objectification refers to perceiving and viewing an individual as an object existing only for their sexual gratification (Malik). Sexual objectification of women occurs when their body or body parts are distinguished and separated from her as a person and she is perceived fundamentally as a physical object to fulfill the sexual desire of males (Szymanski, et al.). As the American Psychological Association (APA) outlines, sexual objectification also arises when the value of a person only comes from their sexual behavior or appeal while other features are excluded. However, both men and women have been objectified in different ways, but women’s objectification sexually has shown to be more rampant (Davies). In such cases, the woman is not seen as an individual with the capability of independent decision making and action.
Understanding gender and sexuality as socially constructed categories is important because it helps people understand a certain group. Gender and sexuality is expressed in many categories and people must be careful not to mix people in the wrong category. Simply because one expresses their sexuality different from another person does not mean they should be bashed or treated differently. Sometimes it does not matter what you identify as, who you identify with, people will always judge you, so its best people just do what they want. Putting gender in a category helps others not stereotype them as something they are not.
As well as feeding off of the sources and material presented earlier in this paper, the analysis to come will also use Erving Goffman 's categorisation of gender to analyse how the women (and some men) are depicted on the front covers of Playboy and Good Housekeeping within said timeframe. In his study Gender Advertisements (Goffman, 1985), Goffman gathered hundreds of advertisements from magazines in various positions and poses and analysed poses and how they portrayed masculinity versus femininity. His way of analysing advertisement differentiates itself and makes a broader distinction of what is considered sexist or not, by showing much like the Heterosexual Script earlier on in the paper, what was considered appropriate roles for men and women. In Goffman 's ' analysis of advertisements, he suggests several variables used when analysing a depiction of both men and women.
