Preview

Be Happy

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
314 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Be Happy
StudyMode is an amazing experience. I think it is one of the most useful sites for students. Amazing and reliable content and it really helps me with my coursework. Keep it up!
StudyMode is a very easy tool for help with assignments and a chance to collaborate with other students. I have recommended this site to everyone I know.The exploitation of women in the media has been part of the advertising industry since its beginning, although the level to which women have been exploited has changed drastically. Advertising is a highly visible and seemingly controversial agent of socialization (Paff, Lakner, 1997). Indeed, it appears everywhere in our lives, on television, on the internet, on busses, in our mailbox, in magazines, and now in the toilets of our favourite restaurants or nightclubs. Jean Kilbourne, one of the best-known advocate of raising awareness about the exploitation of women in advertising, claims that, “we are exposed to over 2000 ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful educational force in society”. But the problem is that it often exploits women as sex objects and adornment strips women of their individual identities. Women are viewed as “things”, objects of male sexual desire, and/or part of the merchandise rather than people (Hall, Crum, 1994). Body exposure and frequency of these ads have increased at an alarming rate over time. Fashion photography has incorporated blatantly sexual poses from pornographic publications that include sexual cues, such as closed eyes, open mouth, legs spread to reveal the genial area, and nudity or semi nudity, particularly in the areas of breast and genitals (Crane, 1999). These chest, leg, buttock, and crotch shots increase the stereotypes and images that women are “bodies”, rather than “somebodies” (with personalities) (Hall, Crum, 1994), which ultimately reflects the provocative, exploited images of women in advertising today. Why? Because society is under the impression that “sex still sells”

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    With the advents of technology, advertisements depict women as desirable commodities this has poisoned the minds of many young women ultimately morphing values and beliefs. Women are shown in subordinate, submissive, and male pleasing roles. Media and advertisement representation reflects and reinforces sexism in society today. The social standards of beauty and feminism are set by Hollywood’s greatest celebrities. They do this by alluring women into buying cosmetic products affirming the concept of female beauty. Companies such as “bebe”, apply the same technique to persuade women in buying their apparel. In the ad “bebe”, the company portrays a woman holding a bright red lipstick getting off a taxi while flaunting a revealing dress. On the other side, she is shown obeying all rules, in bed with black revealing lingerie with an enticing text, “9pm to 5am obey all the rules, you miss all the fun”. The ad amplifies its message and allures its audience to disobey all the rules if they want to become “the bad girl” by purchasing “bebe’s” apparel.…

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Kilbourne’s article she explains that advertising is damaging to the public and most often hurts women by persuading them to submit to a man’s sexual and non-emotional needs. The author also contends that the poses, the facial expressions, and the body language in these ads are being taken out of the pornography industry. Advertisement examples such as ties, watches and perfumes are used to establish that men are illustrated as being superior to women, leaving the woman to be degraded and submissive. Through more examples of both women and men in ads, Kilbourne’s states that women don’t exactly mean no when they say no and that men are strengthened not to take no for and answer. The conclusion that such media provokes the increasing of rape, sexual harassment, and battery of women is also what the author narrates.…

    • 912 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “Two Ways a Woman Can get Hurt: Advertising and Violence,” the author Jean Kilbourne describes how advertising and violence is a big problem for women. Although her piece is a little scrambled, she tries to organize it with different types of advertisement. Women are seen as sex objects when it comes to advertising name brand products. Corporate representatives justify selling and marketing for a product by how a woman looks. Kilbourne explains how the media is a big influence on how men perceive women. Kilbourne tries to prove her point by bashing on advertising agencies and their motives to successfully sell a product. Kilbourne’s affirmation towards advertisements leaves you no doubt that she is against them.…

    • 672 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    An advertiser’s main goal is to make money by any means necessary. Therefore, it is no surprise that advertisements in the media today are preying upon young women’s insecurities and producing more and more advertisements that show how sex sells in the media. Throughout virtually any magazine or image in the media, a reader will find more women than men shown in the advertisements. Some of these advertisements include women interacting with men in a sexual manner, women wearing the slightest bit of clothing, if any, and women posing in provocative ways to sell a certain product. Virtually all of these advertisements and media images portray women who are extremely thin, sexy, and seductive in order to sell the products to either male or female consumers. Interestingly, the male consumer products that are advertised include women either being promiscuous with other women, or with men, while female consumer products only sometimes include men, yet nevertheless portray women seductively, beautifully, and in a way that appeals to men. The above collage helps showcase how advertisers use the idea that “sex sells” as a way to objectify women and hold them to the highest standards of beauty, thinness, and attractiveness to men, while simultaneously suggesting that in order for products to sell, women must sell the products in a sexual manner.…

    • 529 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Advertisements are an everyday part of our lives, whether we look at them subconsciously or consciously they influence us. Imagine how many ads you have seen in your lifetime and how they have affected you over time. “Two Way a Woman Can Get Hurt” by Jean Kilbourne is an article about how the objectification of women in advertising can lead to violence because ads shows a truth and this truth is that women are more likely to get abused. Jean Kilbourne successfully attempts to inform women that objectifying people in advertisement makes violence seem acceptable by using logos and pathos. However, her weakness is that she writes with too many hasty generalizations and also with some post hoc.…

    • 1505 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Living in a society with a fierce hunger for capitalism generates an active promotion of companies' services and products which incites people to spend money on them. Advertisements and publicity have a strong influence on the companies’ marketing process, where creativity and innovation are the keys of attracting new customers, but the intrigue preserves on where should the limits for this advertisements be bounded in order for society not be exposed to things like violence through the media . In her essay, “ Two Ways A Women Can Get Hurt”, Jean Kilbourne - an award-winning author and educator who is best known for her works about media images effects on young people- emphasizes how violence ( specifically sexualized violence ) in our culture is present through the media, which she recognizes as a powerful mirror in which society is somehow shaped by. Kilbourne’s analysis suggests that erotism in advertising promotes pornography, which main goal , according to her, is to embraces the idea on people minds that women are objects used to fulfill men’s sexual desire ( Kilbourne 459). The use of the images in the essay serves as evidence to support the author’s message, where she invites the audience to interpret her arguments by applying appeals to reason while they visualize how inhuman and violent some advertisements are. In addition to her thesis, the author emphasizes that some advertisements foster the belief that women reward men with sex when they wear or buy their products ( Kilbourne 459 ). An equally significant aspect mentioned is that these advertisements produce a collateral damage that aims both genders, where individual ideas/actions coming from the images mentioned can be self-harming (Kilborne 467).…

    • 905 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Jean Kilbourne\

    • 1968 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Mass media plays a great part in our lives. Television, newspapers, magazines surround us everywhere every day of our lives. All of them are stuck with different kinds of ads. But how often do we pay attention to the real sense of those ads and the ways the advertisers try to sell various products to us? We see dissoluteness and challenging behavior every day in life and we got so used to it in, at first sight, such small pieces of film, and apparently of our day routine, as advertisement, that we hardly notice the big picture. For over twenty years, Jean Kilbourne has been writing, lecturing, and making films about how advertising affects women and girls. In her essay, "‘The Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt': Advertising and Violence", Kilbourne looks very deep into the connection between abuse and ads. She develops a theory in which she emphasizes dehumanizing women in ads, and shows us what terrible things sometimes can be concealed behind a simple and funny ad, and what consequences it can lead to in the end. As for me, I strongly agree with Kilbourne, and I am convinced, that harmless at first sight, advertisements sometimes turn out to be damaging, violent and insulting, especially with regard to the weak, such as women.…

    • 1968 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Jean Kilbourne explains the relationship between the women and sexual abuse not physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. Using pornographic pictures of women in advertising cannot only change women’s feelings about themselves, but how men treat women and how the community deems women. This kind of advertisements send message that sex in advertising it is a concept that is well known due to the fact that as humans we are constantly looking for sexual fulfillment.…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Women In Advertising

    • 3497 Words
    • 14 Pages

    It is safe to say that through out history advertising has been a major factor to large corporations around the world. In order to sell their products while maintaining a successful business, these large corporations have become extremely smart on how to get the viewers attention. Women and men are both used in advertisements, but as the world changes and the media continues to grow even larger, it seems women are a bigger target of objectification and portrayed as sex objects in these ads.…

    • 3497 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    African-American Women

    • 1044 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Women, beauty, sex, money--they may seem like completely unrelated words but when combined together create a powerful driving force within American society. This “driving force” is known as media, though, in this essay, I will be focusing mainly on advertisements. There are a variety of ads being made everyday and can be spotted almost everywhere; billboards, magazines, shops, and even online, just to name a few. However, many of these ads--ranging from food to fashion--have began involving women in them. Not just any women either; these women are the idealized women American society has conceptualized as they flaunt their bodies whilst also implying sexual themes. Individuals, literally and figurative, by into the way these advertisements…

    • 1044 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The intriguing documentary of Killing Us Softly 4 by Jean Kilbourne, provides for a controversial topic of the basis of advertising in the media and how it affects women directly and indirectly. Consequently, harsh results are perceived from these advertisements. Of all the “factual” statements made by Jean Kilbourne during this documentary, many fallacies arose. The media leaves us extremely vulnerable to assimilating ourselves to all aspects of mass media. I can closely identify myself with the situation at hand because I am a part of a society that is raised up on a pop culture that is ubiquitous. We are constantly consumed in the media every single day with advertisements flooding our brains. In fact, I feel that women are not as materialized, dehumanized, or objectified as they are overpoweringly depicted in Killing Us Softly 4.…

    • 835 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the text “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising and Violence”, Jean Kilbourne, an award winning author and educator who is internationally recognized for her innovative work on images of woman in advertising, argues how media images influence our interactions and shape our social reality. Kilbourne’s sensible analysis of these powerful and harmful advertisements lacks a simplistic cause and effect relationship between the way we act and the images presented to us. With an analytic investigation of Kilbourne’s text one can locate several solid examples where she explains the relationship between images and actions.…

    • 1220 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sexism Assignment

    • 2027 Words
    • 5 Pages

    This paragraph will present some interesting factors and information which are related to the topic. In this essay, only advertising media is being focused because of the fact that they consider sex as a basic requirement to sell their products. In such type of advertisement, the women bodies are being misused which present the women as a piece of entertainment and result in the sexual harassment against them. Sexual imagery of the little girls or teen in such advertisement increases the sexual abuses and it has been reported in last decades that 450000 US children have been sexually abused. These kinds of advertisement not only degrade the self respect of woman but also…

    • 2027 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    How Accurately Are Women Portrayed in the Media Often times women in today’s society are forced to conform to a certain way of looking or dressing. This includes, race, age, style, hair and more. Typically it is expected that a women should be a young caucasian female with long hair to be considered attractive. But, what about when a female decides to dress in tighter or shorter clothes and embrace her body.…

    • 2068 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    American Apparel would be a worldwide U.S. clothing line company, based in Los Angeles, California, created by Dov Charney. From the findings the author made, it was discovered that when he was setting up the business, around 1997, his design strategy was ‘Classic Design’, but some how his print campaigns are award-winning among the most followed in the garment industry. However, his advertising has been criticized for featuring young, even teenage, models in sexually provocative poses. That seems very shocking, the fact that everyone is aware of this, yet women’s bodies are still dismembered in ads, insulted- treated like objects. (Figure 2, 3)…

    • 186 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays