JOUR 4250: What to think, who to be and what to buy

Advertising is more powerful than just influencing consumer behavior. It has shaped our norms and challenged what is socially or culturally acceptable.

Our class is moving into race and gender portrayals in advertising after understanding patterns and statistics with race and gender in news coverage. The first article discussed in class was about the portrayal of women specifically in advertisements.

The documentary we watched, “Killing Us Softly 4”, complemented the article by uncovering many of the messages advertising sends to us. The film exposed how these messages often over sexualize women and turn them into objects rather than human beings.

The filmmaker, Jean Kilbourne, made the connection between objectifying women, or anything for that matter, with violent crimes. Kilbourne said when advertisements turn women into sexual objects they become dehumanized. When someone is dehumanized less emotion and feelings are attached to them.

 Some of the advertisements used as examples in the documentary were just outright violent. There was no need to explain how the messages sent from these advertisements connected with actual behavior. Many of the advertisements showed women being the victim of violence.

 The documentary honed in on the negative side effects of consistently showing undernourished or Photoshopped women in advertisements. The result: more women having poor self-esteem and a correlation with the increase of eating disorders in this country.

 Examples like increases in eating disorders and low self-esteem come to show how powerful advertising is. Click here to see current facts and statistics on eating disorders.

Advertising is most successful when it can successfully provide solutions to consumers’ problems. Technology has made it possible for advertisers to feature images of women with impossible features. If a magazine cover advertises acne cream and has a digitally enhanced image of a woman with perfectly unnatural skin, it subconsciously pressures consumers to strive for something they will never attain. It seems to be working for advertisers, too.

Now we have a current trend of advertisements featuring the “common man.” Kilbourne briefly went over how men are portrayed in advertisements. Women are predominately portrayed as weak and vulnerable while men are predominately portrayed as independent and not showing emotion. With these masculine characteristics come the masculine physical features associated with them.

At first the “common man” seemed like a great idea, something more humanizing. Our readings from the class told us these advertisements caught on because when we see somebody who may be less masculine, we feel better about ourselves. Although this may seem selfish and shallow it makes sense for consumers to think this way after seeing false examples of what we should be like ad after ad.

Both men and women alike see too many advertisements featuring false images of people. This puts pressure on how we feel and how we act. It is up to us as consumers to read through the lines with the thousands of advertisements we see each day.