Tom Ford Objectifies Woman's Bodies

Lips, Neck, Breasts – all logical body parts to be shown in advertisements for cologne, right? Sadly, in today’s society, the answer is yes. We are bombarded on a daily basis with thousands of advertisements. They are impossible to avoid and even more impossible to ignore. Whether consciously or unconsciously what we see in these advertisements affects us as a culture. In many of these advertisements women’s bodies are dehumanized. In Jean Kilbourne’s article, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt,” she argues, “ads affect us in far more profound and potentially damaging ways. The way that ads portray bodies – especially women’s bodies – as objects conditions us to seeing each other in dehumanizing ways, thus “normalizing” attitudes that can lead to sexual aggression” (444). She realizes that these ads we see every day are affecting our society in an incredibly negative way. One of the most controversial designers of our time, Tom Ford, objectifies women’s bodies in almost every advertisement he promotes, leading to an increase in sexual aggression towards women.
Tom Ford degrades women in all of his advertisements. In particular, his first fragrance ad was profoundly objectifying towards women’s bodies. The ad displays a woman’s body from just bellow her belly button to her mid thigh. Nested between her legs, on her pubic bone, is Tom Ford’s cologne. It is completely exploiting the female body. The woman in the photograph is no longer a woman, or even human, but instead her humanity is striped away and she is left, objectified, with a sexualized body part. Kilbourne touches on the dangers of this taking place, “The person becomes an object and violence is inevitable. This step is already taken with women. The violence, the abuse, is partly the chilling but logical result of the objectification” (453). This is the epitome of why objectification is such a serious problem in society today. Women are no longer seen as people, rather sexual objects to be ogled by men.
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