The role of woman was always important in our society. She was exposed in images that varied in different periods as society developed. At the very beginning, woman was shown as a keeper of the family because of her ability to give birth. Later on, woman was portrayed as a person who is supposed to stay at home, look after her man, children and household. She was not supposed study in school or work on her carrier. At the present time, woman is a symbol of beauty, intelligence and capability of being successful either at home or at her occupation. This new portray influenced the advertising business, or maybe the advertisements influenced the recent role of women in our society.
From the times of Merlin Monroe, the figure of women in advertising went through a big change. None of her hips and belly would be acceptable in advertising businesses nowadays. In the recent ads, there are extremely skinny women presented with unnatural shape of their body. In fact, in many cases this type of body can be either inherited either forced by some drastic eating methods. However, only a little percentage of women in our society can have a body like this.
Conversely, the ordinary woman who sees these kinds of ads can get a wrong impression of ‘modern’ beauty. According to A. Hendriks, “after simply viewing images of society’s perception of ideal bodies, 95 percent of women overestimated their body sizes. Forty percent of women overestimated by 50 percent the size of their cheeks, waist, hips or thighs.” This clearly shows that recent ads do leave some kind of an effect on women living in this society.
The biggest parts of society affected by these advertisements are girls in young age. Steve Hall, the author of the article Portrayal of Women in Advertising Damaging, claims that “if all we see are unachievable representations of ourselves then certain unhealthy illusions of self are sure to emerge. And have. Just visit a high school hallway.” There are young ladies that visit web sites that actually advise them how to get skinny in the most unnatural ways: causing various eating disorders. In fact, these advices are very dangerous and can cause death of innocent lives: all just because of some fake image in the commercial.
The question remains, why should we care? We should care because the facts and figures are alarming. Anna Gonzalez states that “the number of girls unhappy with their bodies increases to 78 percent at the age of 18 and 53 percent of thirteen year old girls do not like their bodies” (Save Us From the Media). It seams like a new illogical fashion. What is going to happen with these girls when they get older? What kind of generation is going to be developed? There should be enough material available to prevent these actions and be used as prevention from the ‘true’ face of advertising.
We as women should realize if we want to follow a fake image created behind the camera, what we are probably not going achieve without torturing ourselves anyways, or if we want to make a change in this society. The advertisements are created for us so we should show that we do not agree with them. At the same time, male population should also look at these ads rationally because the women they see there are not real. Real women, maybe a little bit tired, with mimics wrinkles and different body size, are around them on the streets every day. That is a real image of woman and we should learn how to appreciate it in the world of many fake reflections.
Bibliography
Gonzalez, Anna. "Save Us From the Media." Discourse. 7 Jan. 2008
Hall, Steve. "Portrayal of Women in Advertising Damaging." AdRANTs. 31 Oct. 2005. 5 Jan.
2008
Hendriks, A. (2002). Examining the Effects of Hegemonic Depictions of Female
Bodies on Television: a Call for Theory and Programmatic Research. Critical Studies in
Mass Communications, (19)1, 106-123.
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