Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Women imagined in advertising => Gender, sex and society
Darkbluerabbit:
Swiffer's new string of ads is pretty appalling.
Counseling session
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZg_qLiIj8&feature=related>Broom in the hot tub.[/url]
They suggest that women have an actual relationship with their cleaning instruments. That not only do they love cleaning, they love it so much that they put deep emotional commitment into it. It is pretty fucked up, but people just seem to think it's funny.
yelley:
--- Quote from: tania on 27 Feb 2009, 10:47 ---another thing i find interesting is that photoshopping and airbrushing are becoming more and more commonly used in advertisements.
--- End quote ---
i trust you have all seen this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
michaelicious:
I think now would be an appropriate time to post this video. I am sure it has been mentioned before on this forum, but Target: Women is a series of videos that explores the way different things are advertised to women. It does so in a very sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek fashion and is generally pretty funny! I think comedy is pretty unique in its capacity to destabilise social/power structures by revealing how ridiculous those structures often are. How much power can something like advertising have over you if you refuse to take it seriously?
Darkbluerabbit:
I sometimes have a hard time speaking too critically about the photo retouching industry, because it is what my dad does for a living. Of course, he makes fun of it more than anyone. It was kind of nice to know, growing up, that the stupid clothes don't even fit models. They have to photoshop out weird wrinkles, etc. He paid me to do some masking work when they were really behind schedule (not sure how legal it was, don't really care) so I got to see the raw images, and while the models are pretty, they aren't usually even head turning pretty before some work is done. Interestingly, the department store ad department he works for employs a lingerie model whose breast size is reduced in images. They actually minimize her bust to make her look more "normal," which is kind of the opposite of what you'd expect.
Another odd trend I've noticed in catalogs, is that the women's section is full of very thin women, but the juniors and girls sections have young women and girls of different body types. My mom said "Maybe they think women my age are beyond hope, but younger women still have a chance for a decent body image," which is an interesting thought.
Gurkburk:
--- Quote from: tania on 27 Feb 2009, 10:47 ---i don't like when people who are skinny are told they are unnatural or unhealthy either. i know quite a few people who are skinny and have a hard time gaining weight even if they want to. i think the main issue in advertising is that there is only really one body type depicted, which is the the super skinny one. rather than demonizing skinny people and using larger people in advertising instead as a solution, i think a better answer is to just use models of all different sizes and send the message that people look different and they are all still beautiful and that's okay.
--- End quote ---
I don't really see how diversifying would help though, since in ads aimed at women you're always going to alienate someone no matter what body type the model has and in ads aimed at men, well... :roll:
What advertisers do is simply take your ideal of beauty, unachievable or not, and put their product in there in the hopes that you'll go "Hey, this person is so pretty and hey look she uses lynx deoderant maybe if I smell like her people will think I'm pretty too!" not "Hey this person is so pretty I want to look just like her so I won't eat for two weeks now". It seems you all went into this discussion with the firm belief that advertisers are doing this to hurt you which seems rather narcissistic to me and if ads hurt your self-confidence then you probably didn't have a lot of it to begin with.
Now, the issue of enforcements of negative gender roles on the other hand is something you have to be careful with. On the one hand I come from a home where my dad did all the cleaning so I haven't really seen that these kinds of commercials have any effect, on the other hand I'm well aware that if had the man in the commercial do the cleaning while the woman sat on the couch watching sports and eating crisps it would look ridiculous, like a joke commercial. Which only goes to show that these roles are already well nestled in our brains, like it or not.
PS. I'm kind of hung-over and fuzzy so excuse me if I didn't make sense somewhere.
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