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A Catering Service for Females
When most people hear the word “catering” they often think of a service that brings food
to a location and then serves it to the people there, whether it be a party, a wedding, a funeral, or
a business meeting. And yet this is not the only type of catering that is being done in our 21st
century society and ironically the other type of catering discourages the consumption of food.
Advertisements and their catering towards women develop an ideal vision that is virtually
unattainable and leads women on a constant search that ends in disappointment, low self-esteem,
eating disorders, and on occasion, death. Looking at advertisements that focused on women from
the past fifty years shows that ads only portrayed that time period’s “beautiful woman” then as
well. This type of targeting has always been present to some extent but it is becoming
progressively more out of control and dangerous as time goes by. The role that advertisements
play in the daily life of females has become quite a vicious cycle that seems to have no apparent
end.
There is no doubt about it that female adolescents take the biggest blow from the
advertising world. Being what is referred to now as a “pre-teen” as well as being a teenager is no
easy task. Both males and females begin to deal with peer pressure at this age, although it differs
by gender. While males are pressured into being big, strong, and muscular and are expected to
eat a lot, females begin receiving their first pressures to be small and thin, and to eat quite a lot
less than their bodies actually need to stay healthy. Teenagers are very vulnerable and sensitive
to the world around them. All of a sudden one of the most important things is suddenly to be “in”
and “cool” and what is a better source to determine what is in and cool than the large amounts of
advertisements that teenagers are exposed to on a daily basis. Ads that tell girls everything from
how to be the girl that the guys go for, how to pick out the right purse that conveys the right
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message about you, how to come out on top when competing with other girls for the attention of
a boy, and how to lose weight.
The most common ads tell adolescent girls that their values need to change if they are not
about smelling good, being thin, having the right clothes from the fashionable stores, and never
having a blemish. As Jean Kilbourne says in her article entitled “The More You Subtract the
More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size,” “Girls of all ages get the message that they must
be flawlessly beautiful and, above all these days, they must be thin” (Kilbourne, 158). The
majority of the models that they see in advertisements are more often than not, anywhere from
five to ten years older than them. They are built tall and constantly on diets to be as thin as they
are. Along with that, excessive amounts of time are spent getting them ready for a photo shoot
and then after the photo shoot just as much time is spent photoshopping away excess skin, pores,
and wrinkles. The women who are shown in advertisements are not real and their look and body
type is certainly not attainable. It is a fantasy world and yet for the majority of females it
becomes their unsuccessful reality.
If I were to ask around, the majority of all women would say that they don’t feel like
advertisements have any real hold or affect upon them. But whether women want to admit it or
not the images and messages in ads have a subconscious hold on us that translates into how we
view our own bodies. In the words of Jean Kilbourne in her article titled “The More You
Subtract the More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size,” “The glossy images of flawlessly
beautiful and extremely thin women that surround us would not have the impact that they do if
we did not live in a culture that encourages women to believe that they can and should remake
their bodies into perfect commodities” (Kilbourne, 158). When a woman is exposed to over three
hundred advertisements a day that show thin, beautiful flawless models it is virtually impossible
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for her to not compare herself to these unrealistic body types. If these are the women that are
shown with the sexy man in the bar or at a fun summer party with her good looking husband and
two gorgeous healthy children then that is the body that will get you these things. Without a
flawless, perfect body you are not worth looking at, dating, or creating a life with are just a few
of the messages that these ads scream at the female passerbyers.
The majority of these ads that have this message create quite a double standard for
females of all ages. Kilbourne explains this phenomena well when she says, “Girls are promised
fulfillment both through being thin and eating rich foods, just as they are promised fulfillment
through being innocent and virginal and through wild and impulsive sex” (Kilbourne, 165).
Kilbourne’s message is clear. One cannot eat rich foods and still be as thin as the models eating
the food in the ads. Women also cannot be innocent and virginal at the same time that they are
having wild and impulsive sex. And yet the ads that are shoved in the faces of women show
exactly that. How is a woman supposed to attain this body type and the lifestyle that comes along
with it when contradictory messages are being showered upon her everyday? She’s not and she
most certainly never will.
There is no doubt that contradictory messages of showing women who have bodies that
are starved and photoshoped have a long-term negative affect upon the women in our society.
When a woman is shown only perfect, flawless people advertising the products that she buys and
uses she is bound to examine herself and wonder what on earth is wrong with her. She is using
the exact same products as these gorgeous people and yet she looks nothing like them when she
looks at herself in the mirror. She then wonders what she is doing wrong because her legs aren’t
stick thin, she has slight wrinkles under her eyes, her hair isn’t as glossy, and her collarbones
aren’t as defined. All of this wondering can lead to many different negative effects including
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obsessing over looks, quite a lot more stress and unease, self-hatred, eating disorders, and sadly
enough, death. Kilbourne provides a quite adequate explanation of this with the following:
This tendency to view one’s body from the outside in – regarding physical attractiveness,
sex appeal, measurements, and weight as more central to one’s physical identity than
health, strength, energy level, coordination, or fitness – has many harmful effects,
including diminished mental performance, increased feelings of shame and anxiety,
depression, sexual dysfunction, and the development of eating disorders. (159)
A person can only take being told that her body isn’t up to par so many times before it
starts getting to her head. No one can stand to be insulted and have their body type belittled over
three hundred times a day without it affecting her in a serious and negative way. For some
women always being told that their body just “isn’t enough” of one thing or is “too much” of
another becomes unbearable and the only solution in their eyes is death. This is seen in
Kilbourne’s statistic when she explains, “A survey in Massachusetts found that the single largest
group of high school students considering or attempting suicide are girls who feel they are
overweight” (Kilbourne, 160). While this statistic is extremely scary and disturbing, it is also
very eye opening and if anything else, should help more people to realize that the way
advertising affects women is serious and it is becoming more and more serious at a younger and
younger age. More and more women are constantly becoming less and less satisfied with their
bodies and taking drastic measures to change them, which in the long run seems to end in many
different types of destruction.
What we as human beings can do to put an end to this downward spiral for women is a
very overwhelming question and is constantly boggling the minds of psychologists and common
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everyday people alike. One answer might be to start educating both males and females at a
young age on the topic of media interpretation and help them to realize that if we were to all
work together as a community the media and advertisements don’t have to dictate us and how we
treat ourselves. Through some very hard work and quite a lot of time we could eventually dictate
it. While this task seems quite daunting, girls and women alike cannot continue on at the rate that
we are traveling. We must flip it so that advertisements are catering towards us, real women in
real life. Because ultimately real life is the only life that is both satisfying and worth living.