According to several studies, the average person is exposed
to up to 592 minutes of media. This number has gone up significantly since
1945, which used to be only 309 minutes.
However, there has always been a problem in the way women have been
represented in these ads. We’re either over sexualized, dumbed down, or just
plain missing from everyday advertising. Little girls of color all over the
world feel as though they can’t connect to the mainstream media. Fat girls are
told they don’t have anything to offer society just because the size of their
waist is not “the norm”.
What is “The Norm”? Why do so many women feel the need to
fit the standards of media makers? Well first of all, let’s start with the
overall thinness of most ads. Jean Kilbourne best explains this in a chapter of
her book,
You can never be too rich or too
thin, girls are told. This mass delusion sells a lot of products. It also
causes enormous suffering, involving girls in false quests for power and
control, while deflecting attention and energy from that which might really
empower them “A declaration of independence,” proclaims an as for perfume that
features an emaciated model, but in fact the quest for a body as thin as the
model’s becomes a prison for many women and girls. (Kilbourne 138)
We are teaching women and even starting to teach girls are a
very young age that the perfect body, the body that will make you feel free,
happy and liberated is a very thin, almost unachievable body. Of course, these
ads are not saying in black and white “Be Skinny and you’ll be happy!” It’s in
the way we see ad after ad representing the same thin body.
There has been an ad campaign for the company Lane Bryant
that sort of criticizes Victoria Secret’s “Love you body” ads. They coined the
hashtag “Im No Angel” and it was amazing to see an advertisement that not only
included thin women but also include the bigger women as well. Because it’s not
about excluding thin women, but just having fair representation of all body
types.
It was also amazing to see these images blown up on the
outside of the F train in NYC. My commute to school on some days was made
better knowing that the train was full of images of bodies that also looked
like mine.
Of course it is not only the weight of women that is not
being represented correctly but the type of women as well. There is hardly any
representation of women of color in mainstream media. According to the Article,
Racial and Gender Biases in Magazine Advertising by S. Plous and Dominique
Neptune,
The first content analysis of racial biases in advertisement was
published by Shuey, King, and Griffith (1953). These authors analyzed magazine
advertisements from 1949 and 1950, and they found that (a) only 0.6% of
magazine advertisements contained African Americans; (b) when African Americans
did appear, they were shown as unskilled laborers 95.3% of the time and (c) in
the remaining cases, African Americans were invariably portrayed as athletes or
entertainers. (Plous, Neptune 629)
These statistics and facts today might not be the same, but
still scary similar. Of course women of color are not represented as unskilled
workers, but they are sometimes not even represented as human. There was a time
when most women of color wore predatory animal print. While this may not
register anything to the conscious mind, but subconsciously we are pinning
these women to be animals.
While we may not see the practice of this technique a lot in
current media (arguably, you may see it sometimes), this “ad technique”
dehumanizes a big group of people and that effect can last forever but
hopefully will not. We may see more women of color in billboards and magazines,
but the way they look in these advertisements is not the way they look in real
life. A lot of companies have gotten into the horrific habit of lightening
women of color skin, or presenting her in a way that washes her skin tone in
general because the entire image is monochrome. This has had such a terrible
effect on dark little girls. They often times bleach their own skin to achieve
this “lighter skin tone” when those women do not look like that in real life. This is a dangerous phenomenon that has taken over many different parts of the world
In the western world, it isn’t much different. These pictures
show women of color that have been lightened through Photoshop and made to
believe that this is what beauty is.
Is the media shaping us? Or are we shaping the media? Both
of these questions are hard to answer because things have been this way for so
long, that of course it’s going to seem like things have always been this way
and it’ll be hard to change it. We have been taking steps to change this but of
course, we still have a long way to go. Women are still bombarded every day
that their self worth comes from images they see online or in the printed
media. In a male dominated society, women's magazine seem to be the only outlet
that these women have to feel like they belong to a community to equally minded
women. Advertisers are taking advantage of this space to promote their ideals
of beauty.
What are
other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing when they slip away from the
gaze and culture of men? The magazines offer the electrifying feeling that
women are too seldom granted, though men in their groups
feel it continually, of being plugged in without hostility to a million
like0minded people of the same sex. Though the magazine's version is sadly
watered down, women are deprived of it that is powerful even in a dilute concentration.
(Wolf 76)
Perhaps one day there will be a time when women of color can
see themselves regularly in an advertisement the same way a thin, white woman
sees herself everyday. A thin, white woman does not have to think about whether
or not a certain article of clothing will “look good on her”, because the model
looks like her. There is nothing wrong with being thin and white, but they have
a lot of privilege because advertisements are tailored to them. I have caught
myself thinking a number of times that I cannot wear something because I believe
it wouldn’t match my skin tone, or a chubby girl cannot wear this type of
clothing. Truth is, it doesn’t matter. Wear what you want to wear and like it
because you genuinely believe it looks amazing on you (and it probably does).
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Works Cited
Kilbourne, Jean. Deadly Persuasion: Why Women And Girls Must Fight The Addictive Power Of Advertising. 1999. Print
Plous, S., and Dominique Neptune. Racial and Gender Biases in Magazines and Advertisements. Rep. N.p.: Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1997. Web.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. 1991. Print.
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