Objectification Of Women Essay
Ashley Garcia
WR 2
J. Ali
Essay 2
7.14.2013
Sex Sells. But At Whose Expense?
The idea behind objectification is turning a person into a thing that sells, or is used with no value, and has no regard for the personality, or the moral code of the person being objectified. Thousands of companies use the sexual objectification of women to sell their products. Companies likes Candies, Calvin Klein, American Apparel, Easy Tone, Axe, Kenneth Cole, Gucci, Hustler, BeBe, Tom Ford Menswear and Dolce and Gabbana use women as props in many of the ads that are mass viewed. Half naked women shown as beer bottles, the legs of a woman used as a table, a naked model used as an accessory to hold a man’s shoe, or to lie down, hands tied in the trunk of …show more content…
a car. These images that are produced are detrimental to the consumers who view them. Consumers spend an average of $272,000 every second online. Every second there is 100,000 tweets on twitter, 2 million Google queries, 47,000 apps being downloaded from the app store, and 684,478 posts being shared on Facebook (YouTube. "Social and Digital Media Revolution Statistics 2013.") Never in history has so much information been so massively shared throughout the entire world. The problem is that Consumers, middle America, lower, working and even higher class citizens suffer from these images. Ads that promote the inferiority of women, show impressionable young women that they are products and not people. This type of conditioning leads girls of all ages to think with ever-burdening pressure of the message their body sends, from the top of their heads, down to the bottom of their shoes.
As written by Martha Nussbaum, an American law and philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, in her article called Objectification she lists out seven ways a person can become a thing. Later Rea Langton added three more things to that list in her book called Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, making a total of ten ways to turn an individual, from a person, to a thing. Of those include; silencing a person, to make them into an something that is breakable, to show ownership of someone who can be bought or traded, and reduction to appearance, where the treatment of a person depends primarily in terms of how they look. Silencing: the treatment of a person as if they lack the capacity to speak. According to Nussbaum, the idea of objectivity is confusing because we haven’t figured it out what it means for ourselves yet. She says that if when looking at objectification, one has to look at the context in which it is in. Not all objectification is bad. “Some features of objectification… may in fact in some circumstances…be either necessary or even wonderful features of sexual life. Seeing this will require, among other things, seeing how the allegedly impossible combination between (a form of) objectification and "equality, respect, and consent" might after all be possible.” (Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Sex & Social Justice.) In today’s modern society however, the context in which the objectification happens usually goes against the moral codes of American citizens.
A recent advertisement from Dolce and Gabbana, depicted a woman lying on her back, lower back and thighs raised, one man on top of her holding her arm and pinning her while surrounded by four other men. Advertisements that show this sort of masochistic practice send society the message that rape is okay. It promotes gang rape and violence against women. But they are not the only company who pushes the envelope. The Calvin Klein ad that ran in Australia, which depicts yet another woman in a compromising, vulnerable position and shows a woman who appears to be in pain as one of the male models is shown pulling her hair while another male model is mounting her, and another has his back next to them. Images like these, while pushing the envelope, make even bigger statements to consumers. They tell young men that rape and violence are okay, and at times, even comical. In 2012, Belvedere posted a picture on their official twitter page that showed a woman being choked by a man who is standing behind her smiling. The caption reads, “Unlike some people, Belvedere always goes down smoothly.” This ad was meant to be comical, but it instead sends a much deeper message to men. It tells them that rape is a joke. That violence towards women is not something that needs to be taken seriously. People see these ads all the time, and most people don’t even realize the subliminal impact it has on our society.
Another effect we get from these ads, are the psychological effects it has on women. In magazines we see stick thin models. People who weigh next to nothing and we are told that is beautiful. Look any different and while you may be beautiful, you’re not her, therefore you aren’t the idea of beauty.
“Magazines sell body dissatisfaction to their readers through unrealistic images of women, as well as dieting and exercise information. Thirty years ago, Marilyn Monroe, a size 14, had the “ideal” body shape and size, but today’s standard is much smaller. As the beauty ideal continues to get smaller in our society, body image within American women continues to plummet. Magazines portray and compare happiness with being thin; therefore some feel if they are not thin, then they are not happy. As with women of all ages, many college-age women are believed to hold unrealistic ideals of body shape and size, ideals that can be both physically and emotionally unhealthy.” (Chonjacki, Mary-Singe, “Depleting Body Image”)
Women spend millions of dollars trying to get to these unrealistic ideas of health and beauty. The beauty industry spends billions of dollars a year on ads to make women believe they need that product to make themselves beautiful. Major companies like MAC, Sephora, and Clairol make women believe that they need to spend $10 on this lipstick to keep the eye of her significant other. They show a woman on a date in a super romantic venue, with dim lighting, surrounded by draping red curtains and plush seats, sitting across from a very handsome man in a suit, and the top button of his shirt undone, to show just enough of his chest, and pitch them this idea that to go on a date like this, this lipstick is the kind you need. It’s long lasting, it won’t smudge, as the woman coyly looks at her mate and licks her lip. The entire commercial is so sexual. Problem 1, Dates, while they can be that romantic, tend to not be. Problem 2, the lipstick is probably going to smudge. Unless you don’t move your mouth, but it’s a date, so your mouth should be moving in conversation, not to mention while eating and drinking. Problem 3, this scene is flat out unrealistic and improbable for your everyday women. It confers the idea in many women that this is what it means to be beautiful. The beauty industry is a $80 billion dollar industry domestically and a $160 billion dollar industry globally. One common disorder caused by this sort of advertisement manipulation and consumer targeting is that of habitual body monitoring. Women spend hours of their days, days of their months and years of their lives concerned with the way their body looks in this dress here, or that skirt there, it’s as though there are loops of internal dialog playing day after day like a CD on repeat. Women constantly criticize the way we look and chide ourselves for not being aesthetically pleasing in what we do or orally pleasing in how we talk or what we say. Many of us are addicted to this self-hatred, inspecting our bodies first thing as we hop out of bed to see what sleep has done to our waistline, and habitually monitoring our bodies throughout the day. This process is only amplified by the constant badgering from a billboard here or a television ad campaign here and is the primary way we sustain the harmful practice of body hatred. It is no secret that women participate in activities like this, as it is portrayed in the media all of the time. In movies like Mean Girls, White Chicks, and Pitch Perfect while it is shown as comical, in reality it is much more serious of a problem.
“Your butt looks fat in these jeans. Maybe you should opt for leggings and a long dress to hide that.”
“I wish I could wear tank tops like that girl, but my arms are too jiggly. I should go to the gym.”
“Don’t sit like that, people will look at you and get the wrong idea.”
The above are just a small example of some of the thoughts that race through an average womans head thousands of times a day. Sometimes, it can become unbearable and lead to depression and sexual dysfunction. Many girls are constantly trying to live up to the expectation that the media has set for them. To be 5’9, 110 pounds, to have fair skin, blonde hair and colored eyes. The effects of these aspirations are real. More and more young girls are experiencing the psychological blowback of constantly having these images and ideologies seared into their brains and minds.
“It is estimated that 8 million Americans have an eating disorder – seven million women and one million men, one in 200 American women suffers from anorexia, two to three in 100 American women suffers from bulimia. 95% of those who have eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25. 50% of girls between the ages of 11 and 13 see themselves as overweight. ” (South Carolina Department of Mental Health. “Eating Disorder Statistics.”).
Women are constantly trying to keep thin, buying into the new diet and fitness routine listed in her favorite magazine. Diets like a low carb diet, Slim Fast, Special K, the Atkins diet, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, the South Beach Diet, and juice diets are all examples of major dieting trends. The fitness industry makes about 21.8 billion dollars as of 2012. And the rate is only rising. Studies done from the IHRSA showed,
“The Physical Activity Council Topline Report revealed that over 60% of Americans regularly participate in fitness sports as of 2012. [xix] This is the fifth consecutive year in which these numbers have remained stable at 60% or more[xx]. This goes to show that the fitness trend is not going away soon in America and the fitness industry is only going to grow stronger each year. All in all, fitness is a profitable industry in the US and the numbers will only continue to rise.”(Fagen, Lawrence. "Insight.")
The problem is not that people want to be healthy. It’s why they feel they need to be the woman or man that is listed on the cover of Cosmo or GQ. Why they think their body isn’t good enough the way that it is. 7 million women go to the absolute extremes to make sure that they look like “America” thinks they should by starving themselves with anorexia or binge eating with bulimia. Yet another problem of the sexual objectification of women in the media is retro sexism. Retro sexism is “modern attitudes and behaviors that mimic or glorify sexist aspects of the past, often in an ironic way.” ("Word Spy - Retro-sexism.") There are plenty of ads that show this sort of funny take on sexism. The Burger King ad that shows the super seven incher and a woman with her mouth open so she is facing the burger eye level. The caption reads “It’ll BLOW your mind away.” Travelocity has a commercial where it makes you feel like you are in a screening room for a dating site. The men use a play on words to take your mind from thinking about travel, to thinking about getting into bed. Take the Twix commercial, as yet another example; a man, his wife and their baby are walking to their car, and suddenly the man stops and starts checking out these three women who are having a pillow fight in front of their house. The wife gets angry asks what he’s looking at, he takes a bite of the Twix and says potential babysitters. Women are supposed to think this commercial is funny. While thinking this woman is an idiot, I’ll never make that mistake, we laugh at the sexist portrayal of other women.
“Ariel Levy describes in her fantastic book Female Chauvinist Pigs how women are being trained to be just as raunchy and objectify other women just like ‘one of the guys.’ We’re coerced into doing this instead of aligning ourselves with one another, one of the reasons might be to impress men and I’m gonna guess that pointing out sexism isn’t exactly popular with the guys. Yet somehow women aren’t up in arms, they aren’t organizing protests and boycotts and online campaigns. Some people might try to defend these ads by saying they’re ‘making fun of sexism’ ironically… Advertisers must believe that the use of irony distances themselves from male chauvinism but that isn’t the case. While we think we are in on the joke, the reality is they aren’t making fun of or pointing out sexism, they’re doing it.” (Wallace, Kelsey. "Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising”.) The idea behind objectification is when you take a person and use them as a thing to get what you want from them. Some say that objectification in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. We use people all of the time to get the things we want from them. For instance, the sales person at the store. I just need them to scan my items and bag them up so I can then pay and leave. There is no personal relationship. I do not know this sales person or their goals in life, why they are working behind the cash register of some big name store, and they, in turn, don’t know me. To this argument I would say yes. You are right. In the meaning of objectification to get something from someone with no care or concern of the person, not knowing them on a deep personal level you would be correct. The problem is not when a single person uses another person to get something from them in an employee-customer situation, or those similar. The problem is when multitude of people become unaware of the consequences of objectification in media. There are severe differences in the way society views or uses a certain gender, stereotype or ethnicity. An argument that finds its way into the discussion of the sexual objectification of women is one along the lines of: “Women are the main cause of sexual objectification, because of their seemingly hard-wired judgment of other women.” Essentially the argument stems from a form of jealousy or insecurity about their respective female peers.
Women are often give the harshest critiques of other women. “Put differently, women have one motive for "one-upmanship" than do men: they need to provide for their offspring and they recognize (if only at unconscious level) that women of higher status are more likely to get a larger share of the available resources. As a result, women are not only more likely to engage in same-sex upward comparisons with women, but such social comparisons also evoke greater emotional negativity (anger, jealousy, hatred, etc.).” (Raghunathan, Raj. "Sapient …show more content…
Nature.")
The major argument that fuels most companies, is that sex sells.
The credit for the phrase “Sex Sells” is given to the famous poet Ogden Nash, and was initially coined as “Smut Sells.” We’ve all heard it one way or another, especially with all the exposure in movies, television and advertising campaigns. Normally a scantily clad female provides a more effective advertisement campaign to the almost always targeted male audience. These ads will more often than not sell more of anything then a woman in a business suit. No matter how beautiful she is. It is a fact that a deemed sexy ad, will sell more of a product to the targeted audience than an advertisement with a more homely feel to it. Depending on the merchandise itself, of course. There is, however, a downfall to that ideology.
“There 's a fine line, and all too often these days brands are stepping way over the line. Consumers are human, they will respond, but they 're also smart, well-educated people who will soon realize that they 're being manipulated. People may buy your product one or two times due to the erotic interplay, but if the product isn 't any good, you won 't hold onto the customers for long. Not only that, they 'll feel cheated, talked down to, or outright patronized. And that will take a much greater effort on the part of the advertiser to regain that trust.”( Suggett, Paul. "Sex In
Advertising.")
Many companies believe that there are no repercussions to sexual objectification. They’d like you to believe that their advertisement campaign isn’t suggesting any particular message. As long as you continue to buy their product. The message you get from the photo or commercial is something that varies between each individual. The photographer and the ad team, have little control over your perception of the image they’re presenting or the audience who sees the campaign to begin with. If you see an advertisement that you feel is sexually objectifying then you can make the decision of whether or not to buy into the message that it is sending. This is often the defense of most of these major corporations. However the statistics tend to tell a much different story. Women and young girls, if not taught differently, often aspire to be like the women they are shown in magazines. With last years online subscribers reaching 115,000 women and young girls, Cosmopolitan Magazine is just one example of the reach of these advertisements, and the process of selective sales targeting. This shows just how many women are exposed to the idea that they should be or look a certain way. With print magazine sales slipping in comparison to digital media, these numbers are projected to rise. Making not only the advertisements cheaper to produce, since there is little to no cost for digital production, but making the variety of campaigns that women are exposed to grow as exponentially as the internet itself. Among all of the downfalls of sex being a major marketing technique, there is hope. More and more women are becoming educated and are seeing the flaws behind this idea that the women in magazines and on TV are the “idea” of beauty. “According to the Census Bureau, 685,000 men and 916,000 women graduated from college in 2009 (the latest year for which statistics have been published). That means 25 percent fewer men received college degrees than women.” (http://cnsnews.com/news/article/25-fewer-men-women-graduate-college-obama-its-great-accomplishment-america) More women are economically independent than ever before. In a study done by O Magazine, even teens have started to embrace the differences in their bodies. “42.9% of girls felt satisfied” with the ways their bodies looked.( "How Do Women Really Feel About How They Look?" Oprah.com)
Only women can change the damaging psychological effects that sexual objectification has. We must first make the conscious decision in ourselves to believe that no matter what the media says women should look like, that everyone in some way, is beautiful. No amount of makeup, or expensive dresses, is going to dramatically change the way our bodies were genetically formed. We as a gender have to decide if we will in fact be products shaped and put together on the factory line of pop culture, to be placed on a shelf and to be bought for the right price. Or we can take action, and educate ourselves on the ridiculousness of the ideal women as portrayed to us. “It is true, and very much to the point, that women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others-but it is only by asserting one 's humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all, is the core of our struggle.” (Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Sex & Social Justice.)
Works Cited
Chojnacki, Mary-Singe, Christina Grant, Kathryn Maguire, and Katie Regan. "Depleting Body Image: The
Effects of Female Magazine Models on the Self-esteem and Body Image of College-age Women." (n.d.): n. pag. Depleting Body Image:. Web. 13 July 2013. <http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/357/body-image.htm>. Fagen, Lawrence. "Insight." Gym Insight Blog. N.p., 20 May 2013. Web. 14 July 2013.
<http://www.gyminsight.com/blog/2013/05/most-current-fitness-industry-statistics/>.
"How Do Women Really Feel About How They Look?" Oprah.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 July 2013.
<http://www.oprah.com/style/Body-Image-Statistics-How-Women-Feel-About-Their-Looks/2>.
Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Sex & Social Justice. Oxford [u.a.: Oxford Univ., 2010. Print.
"Social and Digital Media Revolution Statistics 2013." YouTube. YouTube, 19 Feb. 2013. Web. 24 July
2013.
"South Carolina Department of Mental Health." Eating Disorder Statistics. South Carolina Department
Of Mental Health, n.d. Web. 15 July 2013. <http://www.state.sc.us/dmh/anorexia/statistics.htm>.
Raghunathan, Raj. "Sapient Nature." Are Women Their Own Worst Enemies? N.p., 25 Mar. 2011. Web.
15 July 2013. <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sapient-nature/201103/are-women-their-own-worst-enemies>
Suggett, Paul. "Sex In Advertising." About.com Advertising. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 July 2013.
<http://advertising.about.com/od/advertisingprojects/a/Sex-In-Advertising.htm>.
Wallace, Kelsey. "Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising | Feminist Frequency." Feminist Frequency.
N.p., 21 Sept. 2010. Web. 15 July 2013. <http://www.feministfrequency.com/2010/09/retro-sexism-uber-ironic-advertising/>.
"Word Spy - Retro-sexism." Word Spy - Retro-sexism. N.p., 21 July 2003. Web. 14 July 2013.
<http://www.wordspy.com/words/retro-sexism.asp>.
WR 2
J. Ali
Essay 2
7.14.2013
Sex Sells. But At Whose Expense?
The idea behind objectification is turning a person into a thing that sells, or is used with no value, and has no regard for the personality, or the moral code of the person being objectified. Thousands of companies use the sexual objectification of women to sell their products. Companies likes Candies, Calvin Klein, American Apparel, Easy Tone, Axe, Kenneth Cole, Gucci, Hustler, BeBe, Tom Ford Menswear and Dolce and Gabbana use women as props in many of the ads that are mass viewed. Half naked women shown as beer bottles, the legs of a woman used as a table, a naked model used as an accessory to hold a man’s shoe, or to lie down, hands tied in the trunk of …show more content…
a car. These images that are produced are detrimental to the consumers who view them. Consumers spend an average of $272,000 every second online. Every second there is 100,000 tweets on twitter, 2 million Google queries, 47,000 apps being downloaded from the app store, and 684,478 posts being shared on Facebook (YouTube. "Social and Digital Media Revolution Statistics 2013.") Never in history has so much information been so massively shared throughout the entire world. The problem is that Consumers, middle America, lower, working and even higher class citizens suffer from these images. Ads that promote the inferiority of women, show impressionable young women that they are products and not people. This type of conditioning leads girls of all ages to think with ever-burdening pressure of the message their body sends, from the top of their heads, down to the bottom of their shoes.
As written by Martha Nussbaum, an American law and philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, in her article called Objectification she lists out seven ways a person can become a thing. Later Rea Langton added three more things to that list in her book called Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, making a total of ten ways to turn an individual, from a person, to a thing. Of those include; silencing a person, to make them into an something that is breakable, to show ownership of someone who can be bought or traded, and reduction to appearance, where the treatment of a person depends primarily in terms of how they look. Silencing: the treatment of a person as if they lack the capacity to speak. According to Nussbaum, the idea of objectivity is confusing because we haven’t figured it out what it means for ourselves yet. She says that if when looking at objectification, one has to look at the context in which it is in. Not all objectification is bad. “Some features of objectification… may in fact in some circumstances…be either necessary or even wonderful features of sexual life. Seeing this will require, among other things, seeing how the allegedly impossible combination between (a form of) objectification and "equality, respect, and consent" might after all be possible.” (Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Sex & Social Justice.) In today’s modern society however, the context in which the objectification happens usually goes against the moral codes of American citizens.
A recent advertisement from Dolce and Gabbana, depicted a woman lying on her back, lower back and thighs raised, one man on top of her holding her arm and pinning her while surrounded by four other men. Advertisements that show this sort of masochistic practice send society the message that rape is okay. It promotes gang rape and violence against women. But they are not the only company who pushes the envelope. The Calvin Klein ad that ran in Australia, which depicts yet another woman in a compromising, vulnerable position and shows a woman who appears to be in pain as one of the male models is shown pulling her hair while another male model is mounting her, and another has his back next to them. Images like these, while pushing the envelope, make even bigger statements to consumers. They tell young men that rape and violence are okay, and at times, even comical. In 2012, Belvedere posted a picture on their official twitter page that showed a woman being choked by a man who is standing behind her smiling. The caption reads, “Unlike some people, Belvedere always goes down smoothly.” This ad was meant to be comical, but it instead sends a much deeper message to men. It tells them that rape is a joke. That violence towards women is not something that needs to be taken seriously. People see these ads all the time, and most people don’t even realize the subliminal impact it has on our society.
Another effect we get from these ads, are the psychological effects it has on women. In magazines we see stick thin models. People who weigh next to nothing and we are told that is beautiful. Look any different and while you may be beautiful, you’re not her, therefore you aren’t the idea of beauty.
“Magazines sell body dissatisfaction to their readers through unrealistic images of women, as well as dieting and exercise information. Thirty years ago, Marilyn Monroe, a size 14, had the “ideal” body shape and size, but today’s standard is much smaller. As the beauty ideal continues to get smaller in our society, body image within American women continues to plummet. Magazines portray and compare happiness with being thin; therefore some feel if they are not thin, then they are not happy. As with women of all ages, many college-age women are believed to hold unrealistic ideals of body shape and size, ideals that can be both physically and emotionally unhealthy.” (Chonjacki, Mary-Singe, “Depleting Body Image”)
Women spend millions of dollars trying to get to these unrealistic ideas of health and beauty. The beauty industry spends billions of dollars a year on ads to make women believe they need that product to make themselves beautiful. Major companies like MAC, Sephora, and Clairol make women believe that they need to spend $10 on this lipstick to keep the eye of her significant other. They show a woman on a date in a super romantic venue, with dim lighting, surrounded by draping red curtains and plush seats, sitting across from a very handsome man in a suit, and the top button of his shirt undone, to show just enough of his chest, and pitch them this idea that to go on a date like this, this lipstick is the kind you need. It’s long lasting, it won’t smudge, as the woman coyly looks at her mate and licks her lip. The entire commercial is so sexual. Problem 1, Dates, while they can be that romantic, tend to not be. Problem 2, the lipstick is probably going to smudge. Unless you don’t move your mouth, but it’s a date, so your mouth should be moving in conversation, not to mention while eating and drinking. Problem 3, this scene is flat out unrealistic and improbable for your everyday women. It confers the idea in many women that this is what it means to be beautiful. The beauty industry is a $80 billion dollar industry domestically and a $160 billion dollar industry globally. One common disorder caused by this sort of advertisement manipulation and consumer targeting is that of habitual body monitoring. Women spend hours of their days, days of their months and years of their lives concerned with the way their body looks in this dress here, or that skirt there, it’s as though there are loops of internal dialog playing day after day like a CD on repeat. Women constantly criticize the way we look and chide ourselves for not being aesthetically pleasing in what we do or orally pleasing in how we talk or what we say. Many of us are addicted to this self-hatred, inspecting our bodies first thing as we hop out of bed to see what sleep has done to our waistline, and habitually monitoring our bodies throughout the day. This process is only amplified by the constant badgering from a billboard here or a television ad campaign here and is the primary way we sustain the harmful practice of body hatred. It is no secret that women participate in activities like this, as it is portrayed in the media all of the time. In movies like Mean Girls, White Chicks, and Pitch Perfect while it is shown as comical, in reality it is much more serious of a problem.
“Your butt looks fat in these jeans. Maybe you should opt for leggings and a long dress to hide that.”
“I wish I could wear tank tops like that girl, but my arms are too jiggly. I should go to the gym.”
“Don’t sit like that, people will look at you and get the wrong idea.”
The above are just a small example of some of the thoughts that race through an average womans head thousands of times a day. Sometimes, it can become unbearable and lead to depression and sexual dysfunction. Many girls are constantly trying to live up to the expectation that the media has set for them. To be 5’9, 110 pounds, to have fair skin, blonde hair and colored eyes. The effects of these aspirations are real. More and more young girls are experiencing the psychological blowback of constantly having these images and ideologies seared into their brains and minds.
“It is estimated that 8 million Americans have an eating disorder – seven million women and one million men, one in 200 American women suffers from anorexia, two to three in 100 American women suffers from bulimia. 95% of those who have eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25. 50% of girls between the ages of 11 and 13 see themselves as overweight. ” (South Carolina Department of Mental Health. “Eating Disorder Statistics.”).
Women are constantly trying to keep thin, buying into the new diet and fitness routine listed in her favorite magazine. Diets like a low carb diet, Slim Fast, Special K, the Atkins diet, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, the South Beach Diet, and juice diets are all examples of major dieting trends. The fitness industry makes about 21.8 billion dollars as of 2012. And the rate is only rising. Studies done from the IHRSA showed,
“The Physical Activity Council Topline Report revealed that over 60% of Americans regularly participate in fitness sports as of 2012. [xix] This is the fifth consecutive year in which these numbers have remained stable at 60% or more[xx]. This goes to show that the fitness trend is not going away soon in America and the fitness industry is only going to grow stronger each year. All in all, fitness is a profitable industry in the US and the numbers will only continue to rise.”(Fagen, Lawrence. "Insight.")
The problem is not that people want to be healthy. It’s why they feel they need to be the woman or man that is listed on the cover of Cosmo or GQ. Why they think their body isn’t good enough the way that it is. 7 million women go to the absolute extremes to make sure that they look like “America” thinks they should by starving themselves with anorexia or binge eating with bulimia. Yet another problem of the sexual objectification of women in the media is retro sexism. Retro sexism is “modern attitudes and behaviors that mimic or glorify sexist aspects of the past, often in an ironic way.” ("Word Spy - Retro-sexism.") There are plenty of ads that show this sort of funny take on sexism. The Burger King ad that shows the super seven incher and a woman with her mouth open so she is facing the burger eye level. The caption reads “It’ll BLOW your mind away.” Travelocity has a commercial where it makes you feel like you are in a screening room for a dating site. The men use a play on words to take your mind from thinking about travel, to thinking about getting into bed. Take the Twix commercial, as yet another example; a man, his wife and their baby are walking to their car, and suddenly the man stops and starts checking out these three women who are having a pillow fight in front of their house. The wife gets angry asks what he’s looking at, he takes a bite of the Twix and says potential babysitters. Women are supposed to think this commercial is funny. While thinking this woman is an idiot, I’ll never make that mistake, we laugh at the sexist portrayal of other women.
“Ariel Levy describes in her fantastic book Female Chauvinist Pigs how women are being trained to be just as raunchy and objectify other women just like ‘one of the guys.’ We’re coerced into doing this instead of aligning ourselves with one another, one of the reasons might be to impress men and I’m gonna guess that pointing out sexism isn’t exactly popular with the guys. Yet somehow women aren’t up in arms, they aren’t organizing protests and boycotts and online campaigns. Some people might try to defend these ads by saying they’re ‘making fun of sexism’ ironically… Advertisers must believe that the use of irony distances themselves from male chauvinism but that isn’t the case. While we think we are in on the joke, the reality is they aren’t making fun of or pointing out sexism, they’re doing it.” (Wallace, Kelsey. "Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising”.) The idea behind objectification is when you take a person and use them as a thing to get what you want from them. Some say that objectification in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. We use people all of the time to get the things we want from them. For instance, the sales person at the store. I just need them to scan my items and bag them up so I can then pay and leave. There is no personal relationship. I do not know this sales person or their goals in life, why they are working behind the cash register of some big name store, and they, in turn, don’t know me. To this argument I would say yes. You are right. In the meaning of objectification to get something from someone with no care or concern of the person, not knowing them on a deep personal level you would be correct. The problem is not when a single person uses another person to get something from them in an employee-customer situation, or those similar. The problem is when multitude of people become unaware of the consequences of objectification in media. There are severe differences in the way society views or uses a certain gender, stereotype or ethnicity. An argument that finds its way into the discussion of the sexual objectification of women is one along the lines of: “Women are the main cause of sexual objectification, because of their seemingly hard-wired judgment of other women.” Essentially the argument stems from a form of jealousy or insecurity about their respective female peers.
Women are often give the harshest critiques of other women. “Put differently, women have one motive for "one-upmanship" than do men: they need to provide for their offspring and they recognize (if only at unconscious level) that women of higher status are more likely to get a larger share of the available resources. As a result, women are not only more likely to engage in same-sex upward comparisons with women, but such social comparisons also evoke greater emotional negativity (anger, jealousy, hatred, etc.).” (Raghunathan, Raj. "Sapient …show more content…
Nature.")
The major argument that fuels most companies, is that sex sells.
The credit for the phrase “Sex Sells” is given to the famous poet Ogden Nash, and was initially coined as “Smut Sells.” We’ve all heard it one way or another, especially with all the exposure in movies, television and advertising campaigns. Normally a scantily clad female provides a more effective advertisement campaign to the almost always targeted male audience. These ads will more often than not sell more of anything then a woman in a business suit. No matter how beautiful she is. It is a fact that a deemed sexy ad, will sell more of a product to the targeted audience than an advertisement with a more homely feel to it. Depending on the merchandise itself, of course. There is, however, a downfall to that ideology.
“There 's a fine line, and all too often these days brands are stepping way over the line. Consumers are human, they will respond, but they 're also smart, well-educated people who will soon realize that they 're being manipulated. People may buy your product one or two times due to the erotic interplay, but if the product isn 't any good, you won 't hold onto the customers for long. Not only that, they 'll feel cheated, talked down to, or outright patronized. And that will take a much greater effort on the part of the advertiser to regain that trust.”( Suggett, Paul. "Sex In
Advertising.")
Many companies believe that there are no repercussions to sexual objectification. They’d like you to believe that their advertisement campaign isn’t suggesting any particular message. As long as you continue to buy their product. The message you get from the photo or commercial is something that varies between each individual. The photographer and the ad team, have little control over your perception of the image they’re presenting or the audience who sees the campaign to begin with. If you see an advertisement that you feel is sexually objectifying then you can make the decision of whether or not to buy into the message that it is sending. This is often the defense of most of these major corporations. However the statistics tend to tell a much different story. Women and young girls, if not taught differently, often aspire to be like the women they are shown in magazines. With last years online subscribers reaching 115,000 women and young girls, Cosmopolitan Magazine is just one example of the reach of these advertisements, and the process of selective sales targeting. This shows just how many women are exposed to the idea that they should be or look a certain way. With print magazine sales slipping in comparison to digital media, these numbers are projected to rise. Making not only the advertisements cheaper to produce, since there is little to no cost for digital production, but making the variety of campaigns that women are exposed to grow as exponentially as the internet itself. Among all of the downfalls of sex being a major marketing technique, there is hope. More and more women are becoming educated and are seeing the flaws behind this idea that the women in magazines and on TV are the “idea” of beauty. “According to the Census Bureau, 685,000 men and 916,000 women graduated from college in 2009 (the latest year for which statistics have been published). That means 25 percent fewer men received college degrees than women.” (http://cnsnews.com/news/article/25-fewer-men-women-graduate-college-obama-its-great-accomplishment-america) More women are economically independent than ever before. In a study done by O Magazine, even teens have started to embrace the differences in their bodies. “42.9% of girls felt satisfied” with the ways their bodies looked.( "How Do Women Really Feel About How They Look?" Oprah.com)
Only women can change the damaging psychological effects that sexual objectification has. We must first make the conscious decision in ourselves to believe that no matter what the media says women should look like, that everyone in some way, is beautiful. No amount of makeup, or expensive dresses, is going to dramatically change the way our bodies were genetically formed. We as a gender have to decide if we will in fact be products shaped and put together on the factory line of pop culture, to be placed on a shelf and to be bought for the right price. Or we can take action, and educate ourselves on the ridiculousness of the ideal women as portrayed to us. “It is true, and very much to the point, that women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others-but it is only by asserting one 's humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all, is the core of our struggle.” (Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Sex & Social Justice.)
Works Cited
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