In the text Advertisements R Us by Melissa Rubin, the author educates and goes into depth on how advertisements are designed to persuade the audience to do something. It seems that advertisers incorporate certain texts or images in their ads to target a specific group of people that they are trying to sell something to. Theoretically, people are more prone to buy or do something, if they see an ad that sparks their interest. This is where companies tailor their ads to be more interesting and expressive towards the audience they are trying to advertise to by incorporating details that would help target. It is possible to analyze an advertisement to determine who they are targeting and what message they are trying to give off based off the context
In Advertisements R Us by Melissa Rubin, she analyzes how advertisements appeal to its audience and how it reflects our society. Rubin describes a specific Coca-Cola ad from the 1950’s that contains a “Sprite Boy”, a large -Cola Coca vending machine, a variety of men, ranging from the working class to members of the army, and the occasional female. She states that this advertisement was very stereotypical of society during that decade and targeted the same demographic: white, working-class males- the same demographic that the Coca-Cola factories employed.
Elaine Tyler May delivers a concise historical retrospective and critical analysis of the development, evolution, and impact of the birth control pill from the 1950s to present day. In her book, America and the Pill, examines the relationship of the pill to the feminist movement, scientific advances, cultural implications, domestic and international politics, and the sexual revolution. May argues cogently that the mythical assumptions and expectations of the birth control pill were too high, in which the pill would be a solution to global poverty, serve as a magical elixir for marriages to the extent it would decline the divorce rate, end out-of-wedlock pregnancies, control population growth, or the pill would generate sexual pandemonium and ruin families. May claims the real impact of the pill—it’s as a tool of empowerment for women, in which it allows them to control their own fertility and lives. May effectively transitioned between subjects, the chapters of America and the Pill are organized thematically, in
In “What We Are to Advertisers” and “Men’s Men and Women’s Women” both Twitchell and Craig reveal how advertisers utilize stereotypes to manipulate and persuade consumers into purchasing their products. Companies label their audience and advertise to them accordingly. Using reliable sources such as Stanford Research Institute, companies are able to use the data to their advantage to help market their products to a specific demographic. Craig and Twitchell give examples of this ploy in action by revealing how companies use “positioning” to advertise the same product to two demographics to earn more profit. Craig delves more into the advertisers ' plan by exposing the science behind commercials.
Charles Barber’s article, “The Medicated Americans: Antidepressants Prescriptions on the Rise,” focuses on the views of “depression” and “Depression” that are caused by antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, and Norpramin. Barber talks about how people do not understand the differences of depression which causes misdiagnoses and misunderstanding of the two. One meaning of “Depression” is how it is used to do describe a serious medical condition and the other meaning a broad terming meaning feeling down, bummed out, or anything along those lines. A study conducted by the New England Research Institution showed that 43 percent of people who have been prescribed antidepressants did not have any diagnosis of depression or any mental health conditions.
The expectation of women to look a certain way is immensely affecting women around the world. Killbourne, 2010 discusses immense influence the media has in our society, furthermore, stating “Almost every aspect of popular culture is about marketing” (J. Killbourne, 2010). The need for individuals to fit in drives the markets, which results in personas that many women believe are obtainable, however the figures displayed are often shown completely reconfigured from their original self. Killbourne, 2010 also discusses how advertisements tell individuals who they are, and who they should be; due to the nature of the advertisements targeting individuals subconscious, which furthermore creates the pressures of conformity that are extremely negative for youth. Women see models, wearing varieties of different things, which drives the subconscious to influence individuals to conform to the standards and try and obtain looks exactly, or similar to the figures they witness in adds (J. Killbourne, 2010).
Annotated Bibliography Introduction: Examine different kinds of advertisements and the problem at hand with how they perpetuate stereotypes, such as; gender, race, and religion. Thesis: The problem in society today is in the industry of social media. In efforts to attract the eye of the general population, advertising companies create billboards, commercials, flyers and other ads with stereotypes that are accepted in today’s society. Because of the nations’ cultural expectation for all different types of people, advertisement businesses follow and portray exactly what and how each specific gender, race, or religion should be.
Consequently, she would likely challenge Cox’s description of the role that women played as the subject of advertisements in the 1920s as nothing more than objects whose sole purpose is to be beautiful. She would be more prone to state that instead of this harsh and objectifying image set forth in Cox’s narrative, women as subjects in advertisements during this time period were “the visual representation of a modern cultural consciousness that defined the 1920s” (Rabinovitch-Fox, 374). This is a very drastic contrast to what has been the narrative thus far regarding women’s status in society through the lens of the advertising companies. These companies have either been demeaning them as nothing more than housewives by pandering to that notion in their radio programming or outright objectifying women completely when they make them the subject of an
Depression is a public health issue and considered a mental illness and a disability, it affects over 14 million adults with women 18 to 45 years of age accounting for the largest proportion of this group (NIMH, 2012). Decades ago when women suffered from postpartum depression, stress, anxiety, and exhaustion, they were committed to an asylum also called mad houses and would be considered insane and locked up. The asylums were often run by men without medical degrees and untrained staff. Some of the women would be treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), drugs, many were strapped down to beds and some were just locked away and considered incurable. Women were treated with Mercury and Antimony; which both are toxic, they were given lobotomies
Retrieved December 04, 2016, from http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/depression/exploring-gender-difference-depression
We have all seen advertisements in magazines, billboards, commercials, and even the internet filled with attractive women and men who are used to grab the attention of consumer and sell products on any type of media source. This would fall under McClintock’s second advertisement technique, “Glittering Generalities”, that advertisements are used to sell goods to consumers (698) and sex sells as Joyce Garity points out in her essay “Is Sex All That Matters?” Garity speaks about how advertisements use sex appeal to grab the attention of readers and how their minds are dragged into a world of fiction, filled with beautiful people who seem to have a carefree lifestyle, all worldly possessions one could possibly want, and the sex appeal that most if not all people desire in the advertisement(756). Garity is a social worker and her essay primarily focuses on Elaine, who is a young woman, alone, and carrying her second child. Garity hands Elaine a magazine and inside that magazine, advertisements show “junior fashion models in snug jeans”, “a barely clad young couple sprawled on a bed”, and a “waif-thin girl draped stomach down across a couch, naked, her startled expression suggestion helplessness in the face of an unseen yet approaching threat” (756).
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.
“Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person” (Kilbourne,278). When advertisers continuously use women as sex objects in order to sell their products they begin to form the mindset that “all women, regardless of age, are
The objectification of women contains the act of ignoring the personal and intellectual capacities and potentialities of a female; and reducing a women’s value/worth or role in society to that of an instrument for the sexual pleasure that she can produce in minds of another. The representation of women using sexualized images that have increased significantly in the amount and also the severity of the images that’s been used explicitly throughout the 20th century. Advertisement generally represent women as sexual objects, subordinated to men, and even as objects of sexual violence, and such advertisements contribute to discrimination against women in the workplace, and normalize attitudes which results in sexual harassment and even violence
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.
