The Battle of Being Represented Correctly (Post #3)

     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.

Post 3

The obvious sexism and patriarchy located in today’s advertisements are probably the best kept secrets in the world. The reason being that nobody knows it’s a secret, everyone has separated demonized words like patriarchy and sexism from what’s normal to where it would seem one would have to go above and beyond to be sexist. Another thing that makes it such a well-kept secret is that it’s not at all intentional to be as reinforcing as it is.

Advertisements just want to sell products, and a lot of the time, they use tactics that get to us on a

This model lacks any bad features

subconscious level to make us go crazy for it. In the same way a kids cereal would put a cartoon animal in their commercials to sell is the same kind of exploitation used in all advertisements. A beer commercial would put in a bunch of scantily clad women to appeal to sexual desires for men, linking the satisfaction of it to the beer. A perfume advertisement would have an attractive model in expensive clothing on it, linking the desires to be her for women, and associating achieving that with the product. It’s a cheap tactic when you think of it, to sell values instead of quality, but it sells. The values are usually unrelated to the product in any way. How are women in bikinis or women in expensive clothing related to beer or perfume? How exactly is sex associated with food? In the advertising world, they can be basically the same thing. In Bordo’s “Hunger as Ideology” there are a few examples of food commercials being related to sex followed by an analysis of the ads. It explains that “In these commercials, food is constructed as a sexual object of desire, and eating is legitimated as much more than a purely nutritive activity. Rather, food is supposed to supply sensual delight and succor – not as metaphorically standing for something else, but as an erotic experience in itself.” (Bordo, 112)Commercials like these don’t really sell food, they sell food sex, if that makes sense.

Unfortunately, it unintentionally sells a byproduct, a standard for perfection for humans. Such as the ideal woman being seductive and thin or the ideal man being muscular and aggressive, such ideals have been learned and reinforced and learned and reinforced. Wykes Gunther’s “Body Messages and Body Meanings” shows an experiment that reveals the effects of these ideals. It said

This model acts as a seductress

We judge our own bodies more than others. 29 percent rated their own bodies from 7 to 10 but 57 percent rated their partners between 7 and 10 / Men prefer short (62%), slim-waisted (73%), long haired (75%), tanned (77%) women. / 74 per cent of both men and women felt they had better sex when they felt about their bodies / 61 per cent felt obese people were responsible for their own predicament / 41 per cent felt the media was responsible for dictating public perceptions of ideal body shape. Fifty one per cent felt the media was one of many factors. (Gunther 704-5)

From this, we can get an idea of the effects that selling ideals are what contribute to ideas like preferences in lovers, feeling bad about one’s body, and feeling like impossible standards are reached through hard work. But there’s really no way to achieve any standards given by ads. In “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising” by Jean Kilbourne explains the perfection of beauty in ads. It says “she has no lines or wrinkles … no scars or blemishes-indeed she has no pores” (Kilbourne, 122). This is clearly impossible, but it’s presence as an ideal woman gives the impression that it is.

Popular culture is reflected in advertisement. It’s sort of like a cycle of continuous reinforcement where we learn what is perfect through media, and then we develop a taste to it because, after so much time seeing it, we’re comfortable with it. Then advertisement takes what is considered perfect and values it to a product, strengthening the idea that their interpretation of perfection is correct.

Although this ad has a pretty model,
it does advertise the product quality

If I was president of advertisements for a day, I would have it so advertisements were boasting their product based on qualities directly related to it. If there needed to be a person on the advertisement, I would have it determined by a random race and gender generator and choose literally anyone. It’s the only way to be fair, because in advertisements today it’s mostly white guys who are spokesman. The effect would be that value would come from the product itself and that it would stop reinforcing the idea that value comes from looking or acting a certain way. The individual products will eventually go away, so their wouldn’t be too much harm to competing brands, while at the same time, people will feel freer to act how they feel is natural and not feel less valuable as a person when they don’t. Such things advertisers today could put in their commercials are statistics, reviews, special ingredients that are uncommon or rare, or anything that adds value to the product that isn’t at the expense of people’s self-worth. Another idea would be to get positive reviews from experts in the field. In that way, value is placed on knowledge.

Works Cited :

Gunther, Wykes. Conclusion: Body Messages and Body Meanings, 705-5

Bordo. Hunger as Ideology, 112

Kilbourne, Jean. Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, 122

Related articles: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/22/this-oppresses-women-stickers-shut-down-sexist-nyc-ads_n_7637564.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/madeline-wahl/why-its-unfortunate-that-sex-sells_b_5433251.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/23/sex-sells-ads-should-have-thought-twice_n_4653226.html

Blog 3 - Dangerous Images in Advertising

It’s well known to most people that there is, and always has been, an incredible amount of exploitation in advertising. More recently, over the past several decades, there has been an increase in sexual exploitation of women and girls, to the point where it’s become practically pornographic. These unabashedly hyper-sexualized images of women are used to sell anything from fast-food to office supplies. Even PETA has released absurdly sexualized ads; this one promotes veganism.

There are several colossal problems here, so let’s examine them. In mass media, not just advertising, women are portrayed as two-dimensional caricatures of themselves, stripped down (pardon the pun) to the bare essentials of what media executives and advertisers consider necessary to sell products and, more importantly, a beauty ideology, to the general public. Women’s bodies are objectified - put on display - to promote products because, as the age old adage tells us, “sex sells”. Their bodies are even sometimes dismembered with images of only the sexualized parts – breasts, thighs, butt, hips – to reinforce the concept that women are merely the sum of their body parts. Jean Kilborne, in her book Deadly Persuasion discusses an important difference between men and women in ads: “even very young men are generally portrayed as secure, powerful, and serious. People in control of their lives stand upright, alert, and ready to meet the world. In contrast, females often appear off-balance, insecure, and weak. Often our body parts are bent, conveying unpreparedness, submissiveness and appeasement” (Kilbourne, 142).

Men are not subjected to the same objectification in mass media, in large part because men still occupy the majority of the high-level positions in this business. Most of these are white heterosexual men who are attracted to a certain female archetype, and this attraction is what they push onto the public to condition them into accepting these images as the ideal beauty standard. Here is where another problem becomes painfully apparent – there are people dictating to us what should be considered beautiful, but there is also an utter lack of diversity among the people telling us what is beautiful! Consumers are a diverse group of people, with different body types, skin colors, genders, sexual preferences, hairstyles, clothing styles, etc. Therefore, it stands to reason that these consumers would be attracted to a variety of different body types, skin colors, genders, sexual preferences, hairstyles, clothing styles... But what the media and advertisers define as beautiful is a very specific concept. In particular, the ideal woman should be young, thin, yet toned, and light-skinned with long, (preferably blond) straight hair. As Wykes and Gunther aptly point out in their conclusion to The Media and Body Image “women feature in culture more often than not because of how they look and the preferred look is young, slender, sexual and white” (Wykes & Gunther, 206).

It’s a common practice to Photoshop pictures of women in order to make them look “perfect” before these images are released with the advertisement. Models and actresses on magazine covers and billboards are frequently made to look younger and thinner than they really are, airbrushed to within an inch of their lives so as to mask any blemishes or cellulite that might make them look like a real person.

Women of colour are immensely underrepresented in mass media, and when they are, their natural skin color is usually lightened; a process coined “whitewashing”. The extent to which these images are altered is incredibly dangerous because of the effect that they can have on the consumer.

In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf discusses the influence of women’s magazines, stating that:

Women’s magazines for over a century have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women’s roles, and throughout that time – today more than ever – they have consistently glamorized whatever the economy, their advertisers, and, during wartime, the government, needed at that moment from women. (Wolf, 64)

These magazines, and the images within, are used by advertisers to prey on women’s insecurities that they, the advertisers, created in the first place.

According to the marketing firm Yankelovich, in the 1970s Americans were exposed to about 500 ads per day. Now, those living in larger cities can be exposed to as many as 5,000 ads in a single day. This number is frightening when you begin to think about it – we are being bombarded by thousands of messages from advertisers every day, trying to sell us a product by telling us how imperfect, incomplete, unfulfilled and unattractive we are. As adults, most people learn to tune at least some of it out as white noise, understanding that advertisers are trying to make money and, in doing so, using unrealistic images in marketing campaigns. However, children have not developed that understanding yet and are therefore much more vulnerable to the effects of media and advertising. A study performed by the nonprofit company Common Sense Media (https://www.commonsensemedia.org) found that teenagers in the U.S. spend about nine hours a day using media, and children 8 to 12 spend about six hours a day consuming media. Children (and many adults) lack the defenses necessary to protect them from the adverse effects of advertising, and this leads to a negative body image developing at an early age, especially among girls.

As Jean Kilbourne appropriately said in a speech delivered at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania: “The image isn’t real, it’s artificial, it’s constructed, it’s impossible. But real women and girls measure ourselves against it every single day. Of course it affects female self-esteem, and it affects how men feel about the very real women in their lives.”

With images of impossibly thin, flawlessly fair-skinned women, how are young girls who don’t match this ridiculous “beauty standard” supposed to grow up with any semblance of self-confidence? Without diversity in mainstream media, how will these girls understand that beauty is everywhere, that every woman is beautiful no matter her shape, size or skin color? How will a young girl know that she is beautiful too? And that she is important because her opinion also has worth, not just her looks?

In order to halt, and potentially reverse, the negative effects created by advertising, I believe that one of the first steps we need to take is restricting advertising and marketing to children under the age of 12. The UK, Greece, Denmark and several other countries in the EU have already implemented this. In addition, I think that advertising food products should be limited, especially for fast food and other low-quality food items that have been proven to have no nutritional benefit and to cause health issues. For companies selling products (food or otherwise) that can be detrimental to our health, I would suggest a warning label be included in the advertising campaign and on the product itself. I would also consider putting a limit on the annual amount that a company can spend on advertising, and make it much less than is currently being spent by large corporations such as the Walt Disney Company and L’Oréal.

These are only some initial suggested preventable measures, and we haven’t even begun to address the other destructive images and racist and sexist stereotypes being perpetually propagated in mainstream media. But if we work together as a society to recognize how powerful the media are, and how damaging these images and messages can be, to everyone, we may be able to develop a solution.

Works Cited

Kilbourne, Jean. Deadly Persuasion: Why Women And Girls Must Fight The Addictive Power Of Advertising. 1999. Print

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. 1991. Print.

Wykes, Maggie, and Barrie Gunter. The Media and Body Image: If Looks Could Kill. London: SAGE, 2005. Print.

Group 3: Advertising to Women in America

If you take a careful look at all the advertisements and commercials we come across every day, you'd realize that an overwhelming amount of them are targeted towards women. Looking into a brief history of the manipulations of advertisements, we see that the techniques and strategies used in the late 1920s began with Edward Bernays. Many of his ideas, for instance, utilizing social movements to promote certain products, are still in practice today. We look deeper into how much and how little ads have changed in carrying out sexist and stereotypical messages along with who controls the consumer power and how we can become more aware of the ways of marketing.

Presented by: Myles J Glynn, Ahriel Wright and Fariha Chowdhury.

Advertising to Women in America

Advertisement vs Objectification

     Today my life changed, after reading these articles I realized that I am not conscience of what is

going on around me.  Advertisement is all around us, but we just see it as a selling tool, well that’s how I saw it. How could I have been so blinded to what was directly in my face, I know I’m not the only one that feels this way? I was surprised at what I found that I brought it to the attention of family, friends and co-workers. I know times have changed and things appear to be different, but when you look deep into a corporation and/or their history of advertisement nothing has really changed. Using Chanel ads as an example in “Sex, Lies and Advertising,” people of color spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on Chanel products and they didn’t or don’t have one person that represent them in their ads. My friend and I did the research and decided to look into ads of today there was one that represented a person and/or a woman of color.

     As women of color we tend to conform to the “norms” of society, if they don’t see us that’s fine, if they don’t acknowledge us that’s also, fine, but the moment we do it to each other that is when the waters become murky. We rage against each other while supporting the capitalist businesses continues to make us obsolete to the eye of the public. What I’ve learned thus far is that the media is a capital business, don’t misunderstand my statement, I was fully aware that this is a business first and foremost, but everything seems linked towards capitalism at the expense of women. It was dishearten to see an ad of Honey Boo Boo made to look as an adult woman that had to do with condoms, a child are they kidding me. Just like the commercial of feed the children, they had the

audacity to use a color boy behaving as a dog and then at the end of the commercial surmise that it cost under a dollar a day (I think) to feed a child. I was furious to say the least.

     While trying to gain capital they forget or did they? The people that has been affected. Having corporations become the mode of stimulation using mass media. Have what entice one, entice us all. I look at ads and say to myself that’s not me and that would not never look good on me, because that person that suppose to be stimulating me into purchasing that item does nothing for me or to me. Maybe, because I’m a simple woman; maybe, because when I see someone that is a size one with beautiful blue eyes and long hair, I don’t see me; maybe, because that ad wasn’t meant for me, but other women may see themselves in those ads. I have a great deal of maybe’s, but one for sure is I can’t support a corporation that don’t see my sisters, my people or even myself in their vision of advertisement.

     Advertiser have forgotten the rule of humanization, once you dehumanize a people, class, race or otherwise you lose sight of what’s meaning full. How do you condone domestic violence by suggesting a cover-up with make-up? How and when did that become acceptable behavior? Suggesting a women beauty comes from the foundation she applies on her skin, defines who she really is, not her true natural beauty. Society holds to much emphasis on what a women looks like then of who she is; why can’t her innocence sustain womanhood for her? Advertisers have women under the impression that a blush, eye crayon, lip dressing or winkle erasers are the true envision of women, while losing the sense of women in the process.

     Women have become this object in advertisement and media, this thing that is always ready to be entered. They are placed in poses that has nothing to do with the item they are advertising for (i.e. cigarettes). What does a woman lying on her back with her legs spread open and the image of her looking in between her legs at a man leaning on his car smoking a cigarette has to do with the brand of cigarette they advertising? She becomes objectified as in this short video. https://youtu.be/9OQYTy1FU_c. So how do we illuminate objectification here are some ideas, we stop supporting corporations that objectify women, we stop supporting organizations that don’t cater to the mass population and we stop encouraging corporations to suppress a women’s true beauty by telling her what she need to be considered woman. This can be the only way we ensure that advertiser removal masculinity out of mass media.