In order for advertising to work,
it is necessary to feed on our insecurities. Many of these insecurities
are rooted in the media's forced perceptions of beauty, sexuality, and gender.
The development of 2nd wave feminism and the progression of the women's
movement is directly correlated to 1950's advertising, which reinforced
falsified concepts of a woman's role in society and who she is "supposed
to be." This subsequently resulted in Betty Friedan's The
Feminine Mystique as women acknowledged the fact that the intentions
of these advertisements (to make a woman feel happy and satisfied with a life
of cooking, cleaning and taking care of her family) had proven to be
unsuccessful. With the inability to romanticize the lifestyle of the
stay-at-home mother, advertising turned to the beauty myth to provoke
insecurities in appearances. If they
couldn’t make you feel like a bad mother,
they’d make you feel like an ugly
mother. These messages of self-doubt are
what make the system of capitalism work, which is why it is the system that
needs to be altered entirely.
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| 1953 Del Monte Ketchup Advertisement |
The post WWII period was
an extremely transitional time for most women.
While they were previously needed in the work force to take the place of
men off at war, this all changed when they returned. It was now the media’s job to convince women
that their place was purely in the home, and that this type of lifestyle was
just as fulfilling and stimulating as that of the work place: “Giver her, they
urged manufacturers, ‘specialized products for specialized tasks’; and ‘make
housework a matter of knowledge and skill, rather than a matter of brawn and
dull, unremitting effort’” (Wolf, 65).
However there was a patronizing element in much of the advertising, as
seen in this photo. The ketchup bottle is so easy to open that even a woman could do it! Mothers need not worry about making lunch for
the kids without ketchup any longer; their husbands are no longer needed for
the job. It also seems that the woman’s
face and the placement of the bottle near her mouth have phallic undertones. Advertising
promoted these gendered roles for as long as they could, until women began to
speak out about how psychologically damaging these notions of womanhood truly
are: “In a chapter of Betty Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique entitled ‘The Sexual Sell,’ she traced how American
housewives’ ‘lack of identity’ and ‘lack of purpose . . . [are] manipulated
into dollars’” (Wolf, 64). As the inner
workings of advertising’s techniques were revealed and criticized, they needed
a new target to which they could point out any signs of insecurity, thus
creating the beauty myth.
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| Ad promoting weight gain |
The beauty myth is a
concept that has drastically altered our perceptions/standards of what is
considered ideal beauty. As seen in this example
from a pre-second wave era, weight gain was desirable. Although still very sexist in the notion that
a woman’s goal is purely for men to look at her, the ad sees extra weight as a
good thing. Curves were sexy. However, because women were becoming more
and more adamant about joining the work force and not just staying home all day to cook and clean, advertisers needed
to alter their targeted insecurities from motherhood to body image. They then decided to emphasize the importance
of appearances:
“A woman is conditioned to view her face as a mask and her body as an object,
as things separate from and more
important than her real self, constantly in need of alteration, improvement, and
disguise” (Kilbourne, 122). And no
matter how much we tell ourselves that we don’t let an ad tell us how to think,
the subliminal motives of the advertisers can slip into our subconscious
uncontrollably: “Like the knowledge of
our own mortality when we are young and healthy, the knowledge that Cher’s
physical appearance is fabricated is an empty abstraction; it simply does not
compute. It is the created image that
has the hold on our most vibrant, immediate sense of what is, of what matters, of what we must pursue for ourselves.” (Bordo,
104). While the beauty myth perpetuates
ridiculous standards for women as a whole, the issue of representation for
women of color is a large aspect of the problems surrounding it. Often times women of color are barely
portrayed in advertising and when they are, it is in a hyper-sexualized,
animalistic way (as seen in this picture below).
Advertisers use images, especially ones such as this, to promote certain
ideologies regarding sex, gender, and
race.
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| Hypersexualized representation of a woman of color |
The underlying cause to all of these
toxic messages is the system of capitalism.
It is required of the consumer to feel that they are in some way missing
something, in order for them to purchase a product. Capitalism strives on our insecurities: “…only
8 cents of the cosmetics sales dollar goes to pay for ingredients; the rest
goes to packaging, promotion, and marketing (Goldman, 1987, p. 697). Consequently, consumer capitalism constitutes
a tremendous waste of resources, and forces consumers to pay high prices for
products that they are induced to think that they need for success, popularity,
self-esteem, and other socially desirable qualities” (Kellner, 130). Not only are we essentially paying for the
advertisement by purchasing the product, we are allowing its ulterior motives
to affect the way we view ourselves and the world in which we live. That being said, things need to change. I believe there should be a limit to the
amount of advertising a company can put forth. A limitation in ads will not
only result in less psychologically damaging images being thrown at us on a
daily basis, but will also make products cheaper because the price of each
product is not going towards as much advertising. The amount that each company is allowed to
spend on advertising must embrace a positive aspect of the potential consumer
and use that to draw them in. There also needs to be realistic representation in these images. It is
important for women of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities to be represented in
advertisements because all different types of women are consumers, not just
skinny white ones.
The world of advertising has created a
falsified reality in which we as consumers can only strive for, and never
achieve. Advertisers promote this
perpetual longing for improvement at the expense of women’s self-esteem and
self-worth; this expense has transformed throughout the years but has persisted
nonetheless.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan. "Hunger as Ideology." Discourses
and Conceptions of the Body. Berkeley, 1993. Print.
Kellner, Douglas. "Reading Images Critically: Toward
a Postmodern Pedagogy." Journal of Education 170.3 (1988). Print.
Kilbourne, Jean. Beauty and the Beast of Advertising.
Print.
Wolf, Naomi. "Culture." The Beauty Myth: How
Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Print.
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