Rhetorical Analysis Of An Advertisement

Visual Rhetorical Analysis This advertisement is found in a magazine, as part of a campaign against rape. The advertisement is glued together, which forces the viewer to rip the pages apart in order to view the whole ad. Once open it reveals a woman’s legs spread apart on a bed, with dark shadows over the woman’s body. There is limited text stating, “If you have to use force, it’s rape”, and the POWA logo, which is the organization that sponsored/made the advertisement. The purpose is to demonstrate the parallels of forcefully opening the pages to forcefully having sex, which is rape. The advertisement uses; physical representation, emotional connection, power of organization to create a response of anger, and personal relation to rape.
The first thing the viewer would notice about the ad is that the pages are bound together, and upon instinct they will try to pull them apart, with the assumption that something happened, and the pages just stuck together. However, the separation of pages is the key part of the advertisement. Only after the pages have been separated is the text revealed. The advertisement will only have
The impact of the advertisement was so great that even though I don’t know what magazine it was in, nor did I get to personally experience the advertisement: I remembered the particular picture. However, this unknown advertisement may be easy to track on google, the original source is not. I researched the organization POWA in search of the original advertisement or at least a trace of it, yet no such luck. POWA is an south african group against women’s abuse, this location difference I assume is the reason for a lack of trace to the advertisement. In return I found a the advertisement on an online magazine website Mamamia, and also the homepage for the POWA