Ads

         We all know that sex sells. It’s everywhere from the food we eat, to the movies we watch, to even shows for kids (innuendo). It’s hard to escape it. In Hunger as Ideology (HAI) by Susan Bordo, it says that woman can ONLY eat if it’s related to sex, “When women are positively depicted as sensuously voracious about food (almost never in commercials, and only very rarely in movies and novels), their hunger for food is employed solely as a metaphor for their sexual appetite” (HAI, 110) It’s bad enough that woman are viewed as sex objects, now they can because its related to sex, there’s no escape from it. If I were to construct or find an alternative to mainstream I would use real woman without Photoshop or overly sexualized ads and show the world who woman really are. This would be so hard to achieve (change is always so hard to accept) I will use tools of the internet, blogs, social media, and word or mouth.

The only way women can eat

       According to this quote, “They are more dependent than men are on the cultural models on offer, and more likely to be imprinted by them” (Culture, 58), woman will become more dependable and influenced by mainstream media then men. As these dependencies grow, so will the insecurities of woman. Woman will want to start looking more like the false images in the ads. My purpose is to stray away from these images and get more comfortable with their own skin.

People actually believe this

        These insecurities are exploited by businesses, “Advertisers are aware of their roles and do not hesitate to take advantage of the insecurities and anxieties of young people, usually in the guise of offering solutions” (The more you subtract, the more you add, 129).  The advertisers are more aware of our own insecurities then we are and they aren’t scared to profit of it. Once women and in this case young people, start to realize that their own insecurities are being sold to them by fictional solutions, then the progression can move in a timely manner.  

       What these ads do is feed into the insecurities and make us believe that our imperfections are our own wrong doings. It's almost our fault that we were born the way we look. These ads give us a false sense of hope that we can indeed change for our looks for the better. Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing As: Sexism in Advertising, shows many examples of ads against mainstream ads, even going as far as paying full rate as a mainstream ad but it wasn’t enough, “The ads were rejected by all of the mainstream billboard companies in the area” (50). So the mainstream media tried there hardest they still managed to land in the Los Angeles Times.

She's not even skinny enough to be in the ad.

        I am a person that wants to believe that these ads will change, but in HAI it states, “But ‘progress’ is not an adequate description of the cultural status of the counter-examples they bring me. Rather, they almost always display a complicated and bewitching tangle of new possibilities and old patterns of representation” (131). I use this quote because the blog is mainly about going against mainstream ads, but we see how mainstream goes against itself in a way that people don’t realize its just there strategy to reinvent the old views from different perspectives. Again, these views may be different to the viewer, but it still feeds to the insecurities. Using the internet Is the best way to go against mainstream, but if mainstream already goes against itself on purpose it’s hard to get the word out.

Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California, 1993. Print.

Cortese, Anthony J. "Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising." N.p., n.d. Web.

Kilbourne, Jean. ""The More You Subtract, the More You Add": Cutting Girls down to Size." DeepDyve. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Oct. 2012. <http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/psycbooks-reg/the-more-you-subtract-the-more-you-add-cutting-girls-down-to-size-xmQ3OQwrMW>.

Wolf, Naomi. "The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women [Paperback]." The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women: Naomi Wolf: 9780060512187: Amazon.com: Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Oct. 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/The-Beauty-Myth-Images-Against/dp/0060512180>.