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Women imagined in advertising => Gender, sex and society

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tania:
how do ads not prey on people's low self-esteem? you agreed that their basic point was to say to everyone, "wearing our shit will make you as cool as these people!"... so it's kind of a given then that the type of people who buy the product are likely going to be those who didn't already feel like they were cool enough and wanted to be cooler.

sandysmilinstrange:
If people are so saturated with the images from advertising that it skews their idea of the norm, they are watching too much TV/reading too many magazines.

Mine is a relatively uninformed opinion. I have not studied psychology or advertising, so the only insight I can offer is based of personal experience and opinion.

Jessica Alba has an amazing body and chances are she knows this because she has pretty much made a career off of it. Most of us won't have a body like Jessica Alba's in the pre-airbrushed photo, but nobody seems to mind that she does ads and appears in the public eye. And I don't entirely understand that since everybody is complaining that the post-airbrushing photo is fake and unrealistic, it also seems to be getting shouted down because it's unattainable. If it's unattractive, isn't it reassuring to know that it's pretty much impossible?

People are somewhat impressionable, but they aren't dumb. I'm not going to buy a drink or a cologne on the off chance that I might look like Jessica Alba/Keira Knightley/Marilyn Monroe by the time I'm finished with it and probably nobody else will either. They aren't selling a body image in that ad. Most advertising is selling some form of fantasy and I think most people recognize it as that.

I hope some of this makes any kind of sense. I don't know, I'm just sort of losing my train of thought.

Barmymoo:
I really, really want to be one of the people who says that they aren't swayed by adverts but I know for a fact that I would buy a perfume purely because it has the name of a celebrity I like on it. The fact that I don't yet own one of these perfumes has more to do with my lack of disposable income (and horror of shopping) than my ability to resist advertising. I don't know what it says about me that I would buy something that is purely scent-related on the basis that the woman advertising it is attractive. Perhaps I am unbearably shallow?

sandysmilinstrange:
Everybody is shallow. Products just cash in on it.

Alex C:
Oh, god, why did you guys bring up Rob Liefeld? That man should be beaten to death with a bundle of old EC comics. Preferably ones with Jack Davis covers.

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