Sexualization In Advertising

Advertisements are literally everywhere, from ad pop-ups on your computer to the billboards you can see driving down the road. The purpose of these advertisements are to sell a specific item to an audience. The audience being the consumers and the ads being products such consumers purchase, the advertisements try to persuade the viewers that they need that item and that they should buy their companies product. While Schneider alcoholic beverages attempt to sell their product to adults through their advertisements by using very suggestive advertisement method which sexualized alcohol. In addition to using ethos, pathos, and logos to draw in their audience. Lastly, how this sexualized imagery is effecting the world

"I do not think that marketers should use sex in advertisements. Sex makes things look more appealing, but it isn't a reason to buy a garment. I definitely look at the ads, but I am not naive enough to think that by simply buying what the model was wearing, I would look like him/her. I definitely think that sex has an effect on consumers, but more on the opposite sex of the model than on the sex that would probably be buying the product." Krista Funke

Jean Kilbourne is an advocate for women and is leading a movement to change the way women are viewed in advertising. She opens up the curtains to reveal the hard truth we choose to ignore or even are too obtuse to notice. Women are objectified, materialized, and over-sexualized in order to sell clothes, products, ideas and more. As a woman, I agree with the position Kilbourne presents throughout her documentary Killing Us Softly 4: The Advertising’s Image of Women (2010) and her TEDx Talk The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women (2014.) She demonstrates time and again that these advertisements are dangerous and lead to unrealistic expectations of women.

An important controversial issue that America faces today is the debate of sex in advertising. Edward A. McCabe and John Carroll are two authors that present opposing arguments about this issue. McCabe persuades the reader into thinking that sex in advertising is no big deal, while Carroll explains why this is a major problem in America. Sex ads are defined as any type of advertising that shows pictures of partial nudity with wording that relates to the body in a sexual way, usually portraying women. Sex in advertising has been around for a long time but has the industry become too sexually explicit?

Every consumer perceives advertising differently, depending on the individuals’ morals, values and if they agree with the discourses of the current era. It is hard to appeal to all of societies ideals, especially when using sex to sell. As some may believe that a topless women is demoralising and “a failure to be creative” whereas, others may enjoy this advertisments and go on to look into the product being sold.

If you were somewhat hip during the last few years, then you have seen an American Apparel ad. Most, if not all, American Apparel ads feature borderline nude women in extremely exposing poses. For example, one controversial ad is a full body picture of a skinny young woman wearing nothing but American Apparel socks. This theme of hypersexualizing women is very common in advertisements, and especially for products targeted toward men, such as cologne and beer. Many of these ads feature stereotypically attractive and hyper-fit women in little to no clothing bending over in suggestive ways have

Everyday we expose ourselves to thousands of advertisements in a wide variety of environments where ever we go; yet, we fail to realize the influence of the implications being sold to us on these advertisements, particularly about women. Advertisements don’t just sell products; they sell this notion that women are less of humans and more of objects, particularly in the sexual sense. It is important to understand that the advertising worlds’ constant sexual objectification of women has led to a change in sexual pathology in our society, by creating a culture that strives to be the unobtainable image of beauty we see on the cover of magazines. Even more specifically it is important to study the multiple influences that advertisements have

The push for de-sexualizing women in ads can be a part of this third wave of feminism. Even though women have been seen as sexual objects for years, the problem hasn’t been solved and is shaping into new forms that continue to reintroduce this way of thinking. In the context of a school environment, a female student can get sent home for showing collar bone whereas a male student could simply get away with a tank top shirt. In this situation, the boys education is being prioritized more than hers. The idea that the collar bone being visible is offensive or a distraction, is just another way of sexualizing a young girl. The same problem occurs within the work environment and women’s jobs have been put in jeopardy because of the sexualization of their

“What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?” ~ Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth. The University of Buffalo reiewed over a 1000 Rolling Stone magagazine covers, and concluded due to ther research, that objectification of women over time has intensified. In the 1960’s 11 percent of men and 44 percent of women on the covers were sexualized while in the 2000’s, 17 percent of men and 83 percent of women were sexualized. This epidemic is called hypersexualization, and it mostly targets women; this is prevalent in the advertisements of today. Over the years the stereotyping of women in advertising has slackened,

Advertisers around the world face one of their biggest challenges today which is to be able to break through the massive amount of commercials and advertisements that people see each day. The average person is opportuned to see about 2,500 advertisements each day. These advertisements can be from a commercial about a detergent that makes your cloth smell really good after washing it to another commercial that is about people seeing you as a celebrity because you are driving a certain brand of vehicle. So how can these advertisers differentiate themselves from the other commercials that you see everyday? They simply use sex. Sex in advertising can be defined as the use of any type of sexual imagery to draw the interest of the consumer to buying a particular product or service.

In terms of women and sex appeal, the world of advertising has changed a considerable amount. Many of the advertisements which are seen in newspapers, magazines, and television fail to portray women in a more positive light. The image of females in numerous advertisements are merely viewed as fascinating "objects" while they are also being displayed in a fashion that is supposed to appeal only to men, i.e. exploitation of the body. Though these types of advertisements are very effective at selling their products to consumers, it seems as if the minds ' of women, especially younger women/teenage girls are being corrupted as they are pressured to live up to the ideal image: sexy and thin with a little extra curves.

Sex is everywhere you turn. Victoria’s Secret is notorious for their ads that plaster billboards and the sides of buildings, featuring scantily-clad women suggesting an obvious sexual air. The bags you receive at Abercrombie feature half-dressed models, often two of which may be kissing or touching one another. These sexual images are far too present in the every day lives of young children, much younger than what used to be acceptable. Aside from this moral questionability, ads such as these often contain images of unrealistic body types, which exploit insecurity to make consumers use their product, the result of which can be dangerous to mental and physical health. Finally, when I see ads like the one to the right, and rack my brain

Gender role bias in advertisements has been so prevalent for so long that the untrained eye wouldn't even discern it. All the same, these biases, for the most part, put women in subordinate positions and men in dominant ones. This assumption on both the genders is unfair and demeaning. These ads portray women as subservient and play toys for men. Not only do the models depict an image nowhere near close to reality, but their bodies are scantily clad and what few clothes they are wearing are very revealing.

How many advertisements have been made that overly sexualize women to sell a product? This happens more than it should. Often women are sexualized just to sell a product. This seems like an effective way, since thousands of products are being sold featuring women this way. Most of the time the product that is being advertised has nothing to do with the image itself. Food becomes sexualized giving it a different impact. Women are either made to feel guilty about eating or are encouraged to eat. Men and women begin to see women differently based on the ads they see. Women and men feel by eating the product themselves, they with feel the sexual tension the image is giving off. In Killing Us Softly Four by Jean Kilbourne, she states, “Not only are people objectified in ads, but products are sexualized. We’re encouraged to feel passion for our products rather than our partners. And people and products become interchangeable in the ads." Both images support this idea that women and food are sexualized in ads.

Sex sells. In many forms of advertising, women have become objects to help sell products all around the world. The female body has been used provocatively to sell all sorts of products. Whether it is Kate Upton eating a Carl’s Junior Cheeseburger half naked, TrueCar telling women they can finally buy a vehicle without men, or American Apparel showing a man wearing a flannel buttoned and a woman wearing the same flannel open with nothing underneath, sexism is everywhere in advertising. The portrayal of a half-naked woman is used over and over again to sell products that have no relation to a woman needing to have no clothes on. True, sexism happens both ways. Men are materialized as well in ads such as Abercrombie and Fitch, Miller Lite, and