The Nature of Advertising

Children are constantly bombarded by advertising on television,
the streets, computers, and the list goes on...

        Advertisement companies take no precaution to hide the gender and sexuality elements pervasive in their ads. Even if they tried, how could they get away with it? Gender and sexuality are directly tied to the product and determines the specific consumers the product is intended for. The elements that are deeper embedded in both the image and the message of the ad is sexism, racism and power hierarchies. Having this knowledge requires a certain level of media literacy that is difficult to develop and maintain during adolescence, especially in this modern day Western world where advertisements are prevalent, and as of late, invasive in our daily lives with the aid of growing technology. Douglas Kellner best explains the influence of advertising when writing, “The phenomenon of advertising and importance of learning to read advertisements critically is far from trivial, as U.S. society invests over $102 billion a year into advertising, fully two percent of our gross national product, far more money than in education. This is a crime and a national scandal, which alone should concern educators…”

            Kellner describes the issue of advertising as a “crime” and its prisoners tend to be adolescent boys and girls growing up in a culture full of facades that can stay engrained in their brains through adulthood. At this age the prime target are young girls since the retail industry knows that females make up the larger part of consumers. Retail companies spend time meticulously researching tactics to make their images more shocking, more attention grabbing, and seem important to the viewer. In these stores, “women are buying their gender identity but it remains described in accordance with the masculinity at the heart of patriarchy and the corporate power of the beauty industry” (Gunther, 211). This explains the sexism at the heart of consumerism. Ads depicting women’s bodies are made to appeal to the heterosexual male. The heterosexual woman hopes to embody the women in the ads, the epitome of femininity, to attract the men who like the ad. Fulfilling those hopes is simple because you can purchase femininity, also known as your gender identity. The ads teach girls how to be a woman, by media’s standards, the standard that most adolescents strive to meet. Purchasing the products of companies that objectify women is further sustaining the beauty industry whose motto is always that women are never enough as they are.

A part of the beauty myth.

The illusory need to purchase these products in popular culture is a phenomenon coined as the beauty myth by Naomi Wolf. Advertisements give promise to make women consumers beautiful by taking out their wallets. Why is beauty that important? For years the beauty myth, constantly supported by mainstream advertising, has perpetuated the idea that beauty is the key to success for all women. Girls grow up aspiring to meet trivial goals, and therefore lowering her true potential. Wolf states, “Just as she is entering womanhood, eager to spread her wings, to become truly sexually active, empowered, independent – the culture moves in to cut her down to size” (154). Mainstream culture swoops in before she can figure out her own path, her own morals and beliefs, and assassins her character before it is created. ‘Cutting her down to size’, as Naomi Wolf says, not only figuratively, but also quite literally.

            The danger is not just in the exchange of money for the said product, but the unexpected after effects that soon follow, or that precedes the exchange. The thinness that is present in a majority of ads sends a silent, insidious message that it is the norm to have that body type. Since most women in the real world do not have the body type depicted in the media, both men and women who view the images see a distorted view of a real woman’s body. Again, the beauty myth is in play because these bodies are ‘beautiful’, and the support is coming from the heterosexual males. Wykes Gunther reports that, “The later twentieth century notion of diet, rather than self-denial or delicacy as reasons to reject food, indicates that slenderness is now the goal of food restriction rather than a symptom” (207). Gunther goes on to discuss the time period of this shift in diet as the second wave of feminism was underway, and mass media was beginning to flourish. The time period, and studies with other cultures suggest that this body ideal is a cultural construction. Latinas are more likely to have positive body ideals than their Caucasian counterparts. The culture is very into food, and being too thin is perceived as unhealthy. Studies have found that once Latinas come to the United States, their ideals shift, and they feel too fat for their new cultures’ standards. Does the media bombard them? (http://drrobynsilverman.com/body-image/do-latinas-and-african-american-girls-have-better-body-image/ ) Many scholars say that media and eating disorders have a causal relationship, others say it was pushed by political meanings of gender identity that introduced the term of patriarchy. Gunther takes on a different take stating, “What emerged was an influential set of ideas that linked patriarchal dominance of the family, the media industries and international capital to the representation of a very male ideal of female roles and looks” (207). In other words, females almost took on the role of a male in how they perceived women, and thus themselves. The perception is solely focused on the body, and so they aimed to ‘fix’ it, but all the while destroying themselves.

     With so many issues and damaging consequences of advertising, it seems as though all hope is lost for reform. I believe that the solution begins with us, the consumers instead of with the companies. For so long they have poured billions of dollars into this effort, so to believe that they will throw it all away when money is still being thrown at them from consumers, is almost naïve. Consumers need to learn to critically assess media as a whole in an effort to prevent losing one’s identity in the fictional world promised to them. Hoping that young people will turn their cheeks to offensive ads is a lost cause, when so much of our lives have become dependent on media and it is hard to find people around us that are not media savvy. Another shield against risqué media would be sex education in schools… good ones. Ads are constantly, and even obscenely, selling sex to young people, and yet many parents feel that sex in schools is suddenly too risky. School should be a safe haven, and is supposedly where learning begins, other than the home. Adolescents need to be open about speaking of sex so that they understand what it is, and how the media paints a different picture of it. Adolescents need to internalize ethical beliefs, and knowledge about body image, race, gender, and many more things so that there is no space left for media's trivial, damaging values.

How sex education in the United States should be! Filled with facts and practical information.
This program is the UN called Adolescent Reproductive Health Program to teach students about
their body changes, relationships with the opposite sex, & scientific and medical classes.
http://tx.english-ch.com/teacher/jocelyn/others/sex-education-in-philippine-school/