PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN MEDIA: IS IT HARMFUL?

By Margaret Wagenbrenner

Imagine yourself sitting on your couch, flipping through channels on your television. As you are flipping, you stop on America’s Next Top Model. You see young, slim women competing to be the best on camera. On the next channel, you see a Dove Chocolate advertisement with yet another slim, young woman sensually eating chocolate. You flip the channel one more time and see a bartender passing a woman a light beer. Sounds typical, right? But what we as a society do not realize is that these commercials and other social media posts instill the notion that young women must be like these women we see in media in order to be considered desirable.

There are endless examples of advertisements that degrade women sexually. However, as we look at ads created throughout our history, have we gotten better? Do the commercials of today affect women’s idea of beauty any less? Jean Kilbourne, a famous author and filmmaker, started her research on women’s body image through media with Killing Us Softly in 1997, Still Killing Us Softly in 1987, Killing Us Softly 3 in 2000, and her latest documentary Killing Us Softly 4 (Kilbourne, 2015, p. 2). So obviously she does not think that women’s body image in media has gotten much better, but why? In the pictures below, there are two advertisements; one from 1974, and one from 2014.

When I looked at the advertisement from 1974 I saw it as an insult. The quote “Keep her where she belongs” and the woman laying on the floor made my stomach turn. Also, if you look at the model, you can tell that she is completely naked. This sexualizes the model and makes her seem more like a sexual object than a human being. When I looked at the advertisement from 2014, the message on the cover “A body for every body” seems harmless, but if you dig deeper, you can see the hidden message that is pressuring girls with the idea that they have to be slim to acquire a desirable body.

In the study Gender Stereotyped Portrayal of Women in the Media: Perception and Impact on Adolescent, Archana Kumari and Himani Joshi collected data from surveys of 100 students in ranging from 17 to 20 years old (Kumari & Joshi, 2015, p. 47). One of the results stated in the study was, “The presentation of women in media has changed the perception of perfection especially among adolescents. Perfection means being skinny beyond healthy standards and fit and beautiful for today’s adolescents (Kumari & Joshi, 2015, p. 45).” The two advertisements that were shown above are great examples of the message that is constantly being sent to young girls and women today. Another discovery resulting was this study was most of the boys and girls who participated in this study felt that “women mostly played submissive roles, and the content of media presents women unethically and unnecessary vulgarity is shown in the content” (Kumari & Joshi, 2015, p. 50).

So, next time you’re sitting on your couch flipping through channels and you see the show America’s Next Top Model, the Dove Chocolate advertisement, and the beer commercial, do not simply shrug them off. Instead, see them for the harm that it actually is and realize the damage that it is doing to the women of our society.

Word count: 559

References

Media Education Foundation (Producer), Jhally, Sut (Director). (2010). Killing us softly 4 : advertising's image of women [Motion Picture]. Northampton, MA :Media Education Foundation,

Kumari, A., & Joshi, H. (2015). Gender stereotyped portrayal of women in the media: Perception and impact on adolescent. In IOSR Journal of Humanities and and Social Science (II ed., Vol. 20, pp. 44-52).

References

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KHOctober 6, 2018 at 8:37 AM
Maggie,

You have a very engaging writing style. I suspect you've got a facility for speaking as well. So why not contribute to our class discussions? It's clear to me that you've got "what" to say.

More to the point, I'm glad you took up the representational politics of women in advertising. As you suggest, there's been quite a bit cultural and academic criticism surrounding this issue for some time. Sadly, with little to show for it – other than women's bodies.

Your approach to this topic is productive: a quick but revealing comparison between two print ads some 35 or 40 years apart. However, problems with typos and a lack of proof reading on your part (and your group) undermines an otherwise fine contribution to the online discussion.

For instance, you've confused the years on Kilbourne's work. And there are typos and some awkward sentence construction in your discussion of the study on adolescents.

While I'm delighted you flagged the authors' use of survey data, this discussion could be stated with greater clarity and concision.

Likewise, your use of APA is inconsistent. Take a look at your use of the two quotes. The second makes proper use of punctuation around quotation; the first, not so much. Same with your reference list. There are a few errors in the second entry.

Finally, it looks like you're using two different font colors at the end of your post. And there's a stray "references" at the very bottom of your piece.

In sum, Maggie, you did a fine job on the substantive aspects of this post. That is, you located several sources and made productive use of this material to discuss the troubling representational politics of gender in modern advertising. With greater care and attention, your writing could be even more compelling and persuasive.

PS Don't forget the keywords (labels in Blogger speak).

26/30 pts.
AnonymousOctober 6, 2018 at 6:44 PM
Margaret,

I completely agree that the media, especially advertisements, target women in a sexualizing manner. I remember when I took my first sociology course "Contemporary Society" here at DePauw, we went over the effect of the media on society. One of the topics we focused on is how the specifically advertisements showcase men and women. Women are symbolized as objects with hyper-sexualized characteristics that become the ultimate goal for men to obtain. This is true as well for men in our current times, when we take the example of Old Spice commercials that hyper-sexualize men showing them as muscular and physically appealing. Ads work with a logic expressing you are missing x characteristic, but you can obtain that characteristic by buying y to become complete. One thing you could of highlighted to strengthen your argument was to show who comes up with this advertisements and who is in charge of directing these ads. Overall great post, I enjoyed reading it!

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