Sexualization Of Women In Advertising

Magazines have never just been about the articles, despite what men say as they buy a new Playboy. The magazine as a whole has been a tool to market to people using whatever means they could, and a lot of the time this means is by way of sex. Unfortunately this means women specifically end up in a troubling situation, where they get represented in a more negative way, and even then are left to only those occurrences. Magazines, no matter their intended audience, frequently hyper sexualize women as a means to capture readership and increase sales resulting in ever increasing rates of mental health and relationship issues among young women. The problem of over sexualization doesn't just stem from adult magazines, as one might think, there’s
There is a lot of research done just on the sexualization of women in media, yet the study that Julie Stankiewicz focused on was the amount of victimization of women in ads. In a world wide study they found that over 50 percent of women had been physically assaulted by an intimate partner (Stankiewicz, 580). In another study focusing on the rape acceptance myth, they found that over 50 percent of the participants agreed that “In the majority of rapes, the victim was promiscuous or had a bad reputation” (Stankiewicz, 581). All of these things can and have been related to how women are portrayed in media. One study by Sullivan and O’Conner found that 60 percent of women portrayed in media were in decorative or sexually submissive roles (Stankiewicz, 582). Stankiewicz examined advertisements from 58 different magazines from a variety of magazines types from women to men to teens. Surprisingly the number of sexualized women wise higher in men and teen magazines then in women’s and entertainment geared ones. In all of the magazines combined there was a larger percentage of victimized women, 9.5 percent, then there were women in a more dominant position, which was only at 3.3 percent. In both cases, there was a larger percentage of sexualization in both of these positions then there was non sexualized images (Stankiewicz, 584). All of this shows that not only are these women being objectified they are being portrayed in a way where they have little to no power. More then 70 percent of the time that women were portrayed as victims they were also portrayed as sex objects (Stankiewicz, 586). These things are connected for a reason, and these images produce a thought in those who read it that women are to be controlled and used for their pleasure. 9 percent