Hegemonic Masculinity In Advertising

It’s an argument we’ve all heard before and there are more than a few books that have tackled the subject. But what’s different from even the last three years is just how widespread the media has become. Today’s teens spend an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes absorbing media in just one day, which includes the amount of time spent watching TV, listening to music, watching movies, reading magazines and using the internet. This is a generation that’s been raised watching reality TV – observing bodies transformed on Extreme Makeover; faces taken apart and pieced back together on I Want a Famous Face. They are, as Tina Fey puts it, bombarded by "a laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful.”

“Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt,” written by Jean Kilbourne, who is an award-winning author and educator, is best known for her lectures on the effects of media images on young people and specifically young women. In this essay, Kilbourne discusses the ways advertising constantly uses images that make sexual and violent situations against women and children increasingly normalized in our society. In order to support her argument, the essay is heavily filled with images of these particular advertisements that portray the sexual exploitation of women and children. Overall, the author uncovers that these advertisements do not promote self-love or confidence. In fact, these constant messages invoke self-hatred and open contempt among young women.

Society's woman is a marketing tool: it is seen as an object, used to sell a myriad of products. Advertisements never seem to associate women’s bodies with intelligence. This is perhaps why it is extremely easy to see women simply as objects. Atwood demonstrates her disappointment in society by saying, “Money flows into this country or that country, flies in, practically crawls in … lured by all those hairless pre-teen legs” (212). She recognizes that not only

Annotated Bibliography Introduction: Examine different kinds of advertisements and the problem at hand with how they perpetuate stereotypes, such as; gender, race, and religion. Thesis: The problem in society today is in the industry of social media. In efforts to attract the eye of the general population, advertising companies create billboards, commercials, flyers and other ads with stereotypes that are accepted in today’s society. Because of the nations’ cultural expectation for all different types of people, advertisement businesses follow and portray exactly what and how each specific gender, race, or religion should be.

In today’s modern culture, almost all forms of popular media play a significant role in bombarding young people, particularly young females, with what happens to be society’s idea of the “ideal body”. This ideal is displayed all throughout different media platforms such as magazine adds, television and social media – the idea of feminine beauty being strictly a flawless thin model. The images the media displays send a distinct message that in order to be beautiful you must look a certain way. This ideal creates and puts pressure on the young female population viewing these images to attempt and be obsessed with obtaining this “ideal body”. In the process of doing so this unrealistic image causes body dissatisfaction, lack of self-confidence

These advertisements lower women’s status as the women portrayed in the photographs set merely unattainable standards that only assist in women’s inferiority. Advertisers should not seek to make women feel bad about their appearance as everyone comes in all different shapes and sizes and not all perfect thin and tall models. Women having a negative self-image of themselves is an ongoing issue, because the media unfavorably portrays them as they do not meet their standard of what the ideal body type of a woman should look like. Solving this issue would incredibly increase women’s confidence in themselves and their bodies, diminish eating disorders, and shrink the dieting industry that so drastically affects the health of

Today's society is constantly besieged by the media, through advertisements and extolling the importance of female beauty and discrediting other virtues such as

How is Masculinity represented in modern Advertising?. (Hall, Evans, & Nixon, 2013) Note: ‘’ Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things’’ Some of the key questions I hope to tackle in this essay are ‘How is masculinity portrayed or represented in modern advertising?’ and ‘Based on modern advertising what does it mean to be a man?’

From an early age, we are exposed to the western culture of the “thin-ideal” and that looks matter (Shapiro 9). Images on modern television spend countless hours telling us to lose weight, be thin and beautiful. Often, television portrays the thin women as successful and powerful whereas the overweight characters are portrayed as “lazy” and the one with no friends (“The Media”). Furthermore, most images we see on the media are heavily edited and airbrushed

Your decisions to comply with society’s view of “beauty” are no longer subconscious, but rather are more conscious-driven decisions. Barbie’s slender figure remains idolized; however, it has evolved from a plastic doll to a self-starving model that is photo-shopped on the pages of glossy magazines. You spend hours in front of a mirror adjusting and perfecting your robotic look while demanding your parents to spend an endless amount of money on cosmetics and harmful skin products to acquire a temporary version of beauty. Consider companies such as Maybelline, which have throughout the ages created problematic and infantilizing campaigns and products for women. More specifically consider the “Baby Lips” product as well as the company slogan, “maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline,” that reiterates the male notions of beauty to which women are subjected.

Advertising is displayed all around the world for everyone to see and it sometimes gives a bad message to the viewers. Advertisements tell us that there is only one dominant way to be feminine and only one dominant way to be masculine and if you do not conform to these gender codes that is not considered normal. Unfortunately, I have caught myself following these gender codes that are shown in advertising, it has affected me with the way I see people and myself. By using a sociological perspective I have started to look into the advertisements that I see and understand how women are portrayed as helpless and weak while men are portrayed as powerful and dominant. I also looked into how advertising supports hegemonic masculinity, which is the idea of masculinity being dominant.

In the year 1998 women would strive to be perceived as the “perfect” woman with flawless skin and a skinny body. In the 1990’s technology changed how we would perceive women forever. With this new technology we now have access to digital editing and other online editing tools that women can use to eliminate all of their imperfections. With these tools our society put a huge pressure on girls to look like the people in the magazines. The problem with this, the girls in the magazines were not real.

This form of objectification is often used as a means to appeal to men's sexual desires in order to promote and attract consumers, because marketers still latch onto the old “sex sells”, or so it would seem (Rowland, 2016). Music videos, magazines, fashion commercials, are all channels through which women are exploited and put out to be headless objects isolated for their bodies solely for sexual pleasure and viewing purposes. Rowland explains that although this charade may allure and trap most men, this is not the case for women. Emma Rooney cites in The Effects of Sexual Objectification on Women's Mental Health, “the sexual objectification of women is a driving and perpetuating component of gender oppression, systemic sexism, sexual harassment, and violence against women”. Jessica Vanlenti writes in ‘Worldwide sexism…Women’, that researchers from The University of Missouri-Kanas and Georgia State found these forms of objectification to be linked to women’s psychological distress, and are leading causes of suicide among young adolescent women.

Women in Advertising Sex sells. In fact, sex sells so much that according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, there is an average of about 293,066 victims of rape and sexual assault each year. It is not uncommon to see women featured in advertisements in a sexual way, sometimes violently. Often times, women in both media and advertising are portrayed in a way that reduces them to nothing more than an object for a strong male figure to use at will. This type of advertisement sends messages to both men and women, that women should be submissive, and men should be dominant, leading to more violence in women.

This research paper presents a content analysis on the portrayal of women in advertisements. This paper is written to better understand the stereotypes of women in advertising. The paper will also include the harsh realities female receivers have to face due to the portrayal of unrealistically thin and technologically perfected super models. Many women are portrayed as sexual objects and are constantly being degraded. Few examples of using sex appeal will also be discussed in this paper.