Selling Insecurities

Advertising is made to make us, the consumer, believe that the product they are selling is somehow beneficial and necessary to have. In many and most cases, these advertisements feed into our insecurities and inner desires. For the advertisement world, they live by the saying “by any means necessary,” no matter how immoral or illogical their methods may be. The biggest and most noticeable system the advertising world uses is the idea of “sex sells”. In many cases however, the sex that is selling is that of the female design. In this case, the question becomes what exactly are these ads selling? While sex and the objectification of women is one way the media pulls the consumer in, the playing on stereotypes is another technique. In these scenarios, as stereotypes already are, these are offensive, but sometimes go subtly unknown. They usually poke fun at someone's ethnic background, or social misrepresentation.

Kenwood Chef Blender ad

Van Heusen's ad for ties.

    While women have recently been speaking out and against the over sexualized and sexist depiction of them in advertisement,these types of ads are nothing new. In Naomi Wolf’s Culture from The Beauty Myth, she explains how for over a century “women’s magazines…have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women’s roles (Wolf,64). In the 1950s, with the ending of the War World II, these ads helped to accelerate a shift for women to go back into housewives mode. To do this, these advertisers made it a point to “manipulate housewives into…insecure consumers of household products (Wolf, 65). In much of these propagandized advertisements, “ads portray woman as sex objects, or mindless domestics pathologically obsessed with cleanliness”(Cortese,54). It was with that incentive in mind that the selling of home appliances were pushed upon the female consumer. In this Kenwood ad for their blender, it shows a “loving” couple with a caption that furthers the stereotype that women belong in the kitchen, furthering the agenda that women needed to leave the factories and be in there intended roles, at home tending to all the needs of their obviously impaired husbands.

Hunky Dorys overly sexualized ad

    While much of the time ads were pushed to get women back into the home, another large portion had/has resulted in the rearing of patriarchy and the male gaze.  “Cultural ideology tells women that they will not be desirable to, or loved by, men unless they are physically perfect” (Cortese,54). It is this misnomer, that brings forth insecurities in young girls and women, which the advertisement world leeches off of. With the preoccupation of obsessing over weight, it’s no wonder eating disorders exist and the age groups with these concerns are dropping, with “more than half the fourth-grade girls were dieting and three quarters felt they were overweight” (Kilbourne,124) as surveyed by the Wall Street Journal of school students in the Chicago area. As one student stated within the Wall Street Journal, “boys expect girls to be perfect and beautiful. And skinny” (Kilbourne,124), emphasis on skinny. With ideas like this from girls and young guys who usually feed in to this unrealistic view of women because of media consumption, it’s disheartening to see young adolescents feel this way. Within the realm of body weight, the issue of curves and no curves has always been the topic of debate. Where fashion ads and editorials glorify women who are thinner than the magazine paper they're printed on, men who are overly chiseled and photo-shopped models overall, this also feeds into the insecurities of the consumers. In this scheme, more often than none, women and their body are out on display as objects. It is with these types of ads, that women and young girls use to measure themselves up against to see if they’re good enough, if not just as desirable.   

Racial Equality Fail

    Just as women as a whole are degraded on the regular by the media, I’ve noticed different groups suffer,well differently. This of course is not to say that one group suffers more than another, each of which I’m going to refer to have become victims in the advertising world. For women or people of color in general (i.e, African American or Hispanic), the lens in which we view ourselves in the media is of course bias. As bell hooks coins the oppositional gaze, it allows us (people of color) to see ourselves in these advertisements where someone who looks like us in not present. Noticeably, whenever one of our people are shown in these advertisements, it’s in a stereotypical and offensive perpetration.For black woman, she’s a portrayed as a sassy black woman who says whatever she wants, and for some reason usually has a southern accent. For Hispanic women, their portrayed as feisty and always dancing with a nasally accent. In all of these instances, no matter if we know it not to be true, advertisers continue to push these agenda and lies.

    In order to change the way advertisers put together these ads, I feel you need to hit them where it hurts, their pockets. If a television show or ad is displaying anything with offensive or degrading matter, us as a people and present generation should boycott them. Unfortunately, steps like this isn’t always easy, especially because for many, the saying ignorance is bliss holds to true for them.

Works Cited

1.Kilbourne, Jean. Beauty and the Beast of Advertising. Print.

2.Wolf, Naomi. "Culture." The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Print. 

3.Cortese, Anthony Joseph Paul. "Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising." Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Print.