Advertisement (Welcome to the Darkside)

We see the myth of the perfect person portrayed in our advertising on a daily basis.  Dissecting the truth from all of the advertising we see and hear can be a difficult task because it is embedded in our culture as a normalcy.  We expect these things to occur and we are unaware of the psychological genius behind the advertisements.  To find alternative ways of affecting change in the industry we must first look at and study how the machine of advertising works, how it affects women in particular, and why change is so difficult.  This article will also try to submit some suggestions as to the ideas and solutions to the major problems with advertising.

            Jean Kilbourne, in her article, Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, speaks about the advertising of images and how it has negatively affected women.  She says “the average American is accustomed to blue-eyed blondes seductively touting a variety of products…” (Kilbourne 121), this is accurate and alarming since a majority of the United States consists of a major population of mixed people that are not represented in our media.  Speaking of women, most teenagers who have been born here or grown up from a young age with different cultural backgrounds cannot associate themselves with what they see on television and advertising.  Teenagers, in particular have trouble with their identity and who they are and where they fit in.  She says “adolescents are particularly vulnerable, because they are new and inexperienced consumers and are the prime targets of many advertisements” (Kilbourne 121).  The structure of advertising primarily is more profitable for companies if you have been embedded with consumerism from a very young age.  The target though does not teach positive things, rather it delves into things that go against common sense because “advertising creates a mythical, WASP-oriented world in which no one is ever ugly, overweight, poor, struggling or disabled either physically or mentally” (Kilbourne 122).  Advertising at times diminishes the line between reality and fantasy.  It makes you believe that you can become these unrealistic characters.  Women are not treated well in this realm because “women are shown almost exclusively as housewives or sex objects [and] conventional beauty is her only attribute” (Kilbourne 122).  The fact that “women are dismembered in commercials, their bodies separated into parts in need of change or improvement,” (Kilbourne 124) is another step that advertisers have taken to ensure the degradation of women and their role in society.   The dismemberment of women changes and affects how young women growing up in this culture, think of themselves and it also puts a limit on their view of what they think is possible of themselves.  This concept discourages women from thinking of themselves as smart individuals with the intellect to make sensible decisions and take control of their lives.  

            Susan Bordo talks about the body and messages related in her writing, Conclusion: Body Messages and Body Meanings, saying “research suggested that women remain significantly undersized on television” (Bordo 206), which is something that can be taken as fact if we look at recent images of how women have been portrayed.  She says “the female body is spectacle, both to be looked at, whether real or mediated, and to be looked through in the search for feminine identity” (Bordo 206).  This idea of women being a “spectacle” has been in our advertising for a very long time.  We have seen throughout history that the women in images have never been displayed as looking with confidence rather observing who is looking at her and always reassuring herself that she looks okay. Bordo speaks about how language also plays a role and says “for women language represents them according to the interests of those who ‘represent’ rather than according to women themselves” (Bordo 208).  How advertisers use language is important to cite because we are a “publicity saturated culture…wherein images and messages refer to each other rather than to any external reality” (Bordo 208).   The saturation of these images further illustrates the difficulties in breaking away from misleading ideologies created by advertisements.  

            Gloria Steinem, in Sex, Lies and Advertising, cites her difficulties to break away from such messages to better influence the advancement of women in her magazine Ms., which proved to be very difficult in getting advertising revenue.  The main obstacle was the industry that was so saturated with the wrong view of women and their role in our consumer economy.  She says “if we could break this link between ads and editorial content, then we wanted good ads for ‘women’s products’…” (Steinem 113).  This idea to provide “good ads” is a refreshing one to all that we see and hear.  This would not be easy though because the companies that would provide ads heavily reject the idea of appealing to women.  This may be due to the fact that in advertising, “authority figures were almost always male, even in ads for products that only women used” (Steinem 113).  Furthermore, it is worrisome that “even medical journals, tranquilizer ads showed depressed housewives standing beside piles of dirty dishes and promised to get them back to work,” (Steinem 113) which is sickening to the core to believe that such prestigious journals of would display women in this way.  We expect these highly educated decision-makers of such journals to be more sensible about their presentation of women.  The representation of women by “U.S. carmakers [that] firmly believe that women choose the upholstery, not the car…” (Steinem 113) contrasts the fact that “a car is an important purchase for women, one that symbolizes mobility and freedom” (Steinem 113).  The negative message behind car ads and others relate to how teenagers are targeted because what they see and hear is translated to different meanings.  Going back to the representation of the young in the advertising industry, Steinem speaks about the decision-makers’ “fear that, if trains are associated with girls, they will be devalued in the minds of boys,” (Steinem 115) which has no basis and no proof to be a fact.  There is no evidence of such a concept; these ideologies seem to reside in these executives that make these unrealistic assertions about people.  The “fear” of not being able to sell a product by trying to reach the women population is an obstacle that Ms. and others have faced.  The solutions though, do not come easy and need much more than just an in-depth review, it requires a movement, and it requires the public to do something about it.

            Solutions are something that we can hope for but a fight against the advertising images and myths can be won only in a relevant push against it through numbers.  We must as a society push back against the relentless ideologies behind the subliminal messages.  How can we do this? Education would be my first answer.  The education of our teens and younger generation is more important than ever before.  They can be so easily swayed by television and other media outlets because we are poorly educating our younger generation about the danger of the myths behind advertising.  I say that we need more classes related to media literacy starting in elementary school.  I believe that classes as such are as important as the push for more math and science curriculums.   Teaching media literacy can affect the well-being of children.  We need to show the negative impact of media against women at the high school level to developing teens so they can be more informed decision makers.   Another idea that is presented by Douglas Kellner in his article, Reading Images Critically, suggests that, “congress could [also] consider disallowing tax write-offs for advertising and could also tax advertising expenditures and advertising agencies at a higher rate, given the dubious impact of advertising on U.S. Society and the massive waste of resources, talent, and human energies” (Kellner 131).  This is an interesting notion that I have not heard of before this article but could be very effective in changing the scope of how advertising functions.  If we were to take all that money from advertising through taxation and use it to fund educating young kids about advertising, we would have a culture that would be completely changed to one that is free of pressure to conform to ideologies that are beyond reality.  

Illustrations of our media culture:

Images obtained from www.genderads.com

Note: The website has a great array of images that depict how advertising works in our culture.