Reality About Ads

Advertising have tremendous impact on the viewers every single day. We don’t just watch ads during movies or shows; we are being engaged to a fantasy world of selling products and ads easily convince us (the viewers) to do things indirectly. Advertisers use different roles to target the viewer’s where:  a girl learns to be a girl and where a boy learns to be a boy depending on what society has taught us about each of the genders is parallel with the creation of the consumer, which is what a female should be wanting to buy to increase her femininity and what a male should be wanting to buy to increase his mannishness. Not only grown-ups are targeted by ads, children are as well targeted. We watch the ads on Barbie dolls  having the perfect hair, curved body,  and  they are beautiful, but in reality not all the children are physically normal, there are children who are disable and over weigh, so some girls grow up with poor self-esteem with the way they look. When it comes to children’s ad there is gender difference, ads are often shown girls playing a role of being passive, and who does the household things. However, when it comes to little boy’s ads show boys building blocks, having super heroes and are more active. So, we knowledge the advertising messages and apply these gender difference massages to our world and the way we separate things between boys and girls.  We are being told what to do or not to do by the ads as Kilbourne mention in her article. In the article,  Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads:Sexism in Advertising, Cortese, Anthony mentioned, “ …there is a big difference between what the appropriate or expected behavior of men and women, or for boys and girls…advertising and other mass media inculcate in consumers the cultural assumption that men are dominant and women are passive and subordinate” (53). These children are given gender difference massages through ads since they are kids, so when they grow up these messages stay in them.

According to the article Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising, the author states “The exemplary female prototype in advertising, regardless of product or service, displays youth (no lines or wrinkles), good looks, sexual seductiveness..”(54).  She explains it very well in her article how advertising conveys women to buy  products to look attractive and remove any spots on their face, which is impossible because even though these women are applying those products, they still have some kinds of flaws on their faces. The only women who looks perfectly fine are the once with tones of makeups on the ads and images, they might look perfect on the television but in reality they do to have pores on their faces.  However, men are as well are being targeted in ads to sell products. In the same article the author argued “Men, too, are seducers-a male version of the perfect provocateur. The ideal man in ads is young, handsome, clean-cut, perfect, and sexually alluring. Today’s men have pumped his pecs and shoulders and exhibits well-defined abs” (58). Young boys watches ads on the television and listens  to the radio talking about abs and clean-cut conveys them to be slim and do extreme work out to achieve that abs.  Nowadays, men are as conscious about their looks as women. Men and women are not happy with the way they look, because ads are rapidly using models on ads and images of artificial looking models to sell their products. In today’s world men and women are struggling with eating disorder, and  low self-esteem because they do not look like the models from the ads and images.

 

 

Advertise  have become part of us unconditionally that, we need advertisements to teach us about updated  fashion, products that we are to purchase or not to buy  and most importantly the way we  should change our looks . According to the article Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, Jean kilbourne states, “They tell us who we are and who we should be” (121). So, in other works we are possessed by these ads that we cannot use our brain to make a decision about what we want and how we wants things to be with our lives.  Advertisers know how to target the viewer’s very well; they also take the viewers to a world where everyone looks “perfect”.  Kilbourne also mentions in her writing “Advertising creates a mythical, WASP-oriented world in which no one is ever ugly, overweight, poor, struggling or disabled either physically or mentally..”(122). However, because of this world they created no one is pleased with the way they look at themselves. Some women want to look just like the so called “perfect model”; slim, no wrinkles, flawless, and men also want to look like the slim male models with perfects abs.  Advertisers uses attractive men and women, who are made to look  beauty God and Goddess  to direct messages to the viewers, for example when these models are being exposed to the viewer’s , they want to look just like them. Therefore, when there are ads on weight loss pills, they tend to get those pills to look just like the models not caring how these pills can be very harmful. 

Women in the mass media are often objectifying as sexism object.  There are majority or ads where women are sex selling products.  According to Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising, Cortese states, “though advertising, the face becomes a mask and the body becomes and object” (55). In the ads women apply make-ups and air brush to diminish there are visible pores and the way they represent their body it seems like it’s just an object.  Most of the ads we watch, we always see women reveling their skin to make sexual poses for the men to be entertain just like the ads and images  from Victoria Secrete .  Advertising teaches women to look certain ways by using products to make them look attractive and if they fail to do so they feel as if they are not attractive. I myself being a woman was influenced by ads, I used to not wear eye make-ups,  but when I watched ads, where women make their eyes beautiful with eye makeups I started wearing eye makeups and now I apply it every day. According to Wolf Noami’s article, Culture “women are allowed a mind or body but not both”(59), that’s explains if a women is “beautiful “ she is not intelligent  and if she is not beautiful then she is intelligent, but when it comes to men if a men is attractive he is considered as the “perfect man” who has mind and body.  We women are looked differently everywhere, especially in mass media. In mass media women are looks as if they are just an object and men are in control of this object just like Lauren Malvey mentioned in her article how male look at women and women watch them looking at them. However, Some men enjoy watching beautiful  women on ads and images  which are 90% fake.  According to the article, The More you subtract, the More You Add, Kilbourne argued” these images of women seem to affect men most strikingly bu influencing how they judge the real women in their lives” (133). So,  men are being exposed to the fake beauty of women through ads and images, they just don’t know how a women really looks without makeup. 

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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

Wolf, Naomi.  “Culture.” The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women.  United States: Morrow, 1991: 58-85.