Olivia Messina
Consumer Behavior
3/11/13
With the advertisements women see everyday today, how is one supposed to feel good
about themselves? The world is trying to show us how we should look or what we should aspire
to look like. How can someone look like a person who has been completely altered to perfection
by computers? An unrealistic image of women is being pushed into society’s faces and in effect
causing girls to feel like they have to be this way. Women are used as objects to sell a product
and dehumanized is many different ways. Barely scratching the surface, it is obvious that this
does not fall into business ethics at all, but it seems to be something that goes on every day
within businesses.
Killing us Softly is a series of videos by a woman named Jean Kilbourne, a feminist, who
decided to make people aware of the topic of women in advertising. She gives lectures based on
her own experiences as well as things that she has found upon research. In particular she talks
about how these advertisements increase the likelihood of eating disorders, violence, and
objectification of women. She has done four “Killing us Softly” videos thus far. Each contains
very valuable information and helps to understand and make people aware of the issue at hand.
The image of women in advertising and media today is not the way that it should be.
Most advertisements with women in them today are degrading them. Ads tend to focus on just
certain body parts of women when looking to sell a product. One example of this in particular is
a commercial that the company Axe aired, where they only showed a woman’s chest wondering
around chasing a head of hair. Through these ads, people are given an unrealistic view of what a
woman should look like. In the video “Killing us Softly 4,” the woman in the Dove ad is
completely altered by computers from what she started out to be. The makeup, airbrush, photo
shop, etc. distract people from the real person behind it without all the fixings. A more recent
example would be the Victoria’s Secret fashion show; each and every girl has this “perfect” body
that everyone wants. In “Advertising and the Exploitation of Female Sexuality” Chineze J.
Onyejekwe, a PhD says that, “Teenage girls now define beauty by the shape and size of their
bodies with the impression that being skinner is sexier.”
These ads make people view women as things or objects and not people; they are
something to be desired. “The general observation is that the depiction of women as objects of
desire in advertising effects gender relations and society’s attitudes towards women and
women’s sexuality.” (“AEFM” by Chineze J. Oneyjekwe. Patrick Stewart (Star Trek actor) cited
by Jeremy Lovell, The Independent Online Newspaper [IOL], 5 March 2004). Women in ads are
also mainly portrayed as “Stupid or incompetent; dependent on men; decorative or sex objects;
passive; and not involved in making major decisions.” (How Should Women be Portrayed in
Advertisements? A Call for Research by Mary Lour Roberts). In one ad from the video “Killing
us Softly,” there is a beautiful woman on the front with a quote saying “My boyfriend told me
that he loved me for my mind. I was never so insulted in my life.” This ad just reinforces what
Roberts was saying about the way women are portrayed in ads.
Going along with women being seeing as objects, is that they are seen as solely parts
instead of a whole. This often is because of the way parts of women’s bodies are used to sell
products anymore; there is often times no need to show the entirety of a woman’s body.
According to the article “Our Brains See Men as Whole and Women as Parts,” by Stephanie
Pappas, women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain, they aren’t seen as a whole,
while when we view men, they are viewed as a whole. These ads dehumanize women,
dismembering her body. Sky Vodka in particular uses tanned, toned, women’s legs to sell their
vodka in an Ad for Cosmo Magazine. Sara Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska,
did a study on her students about how men and women view each other. The pictures of women
were more easily recognized by separate body parts than the whole body when they had to match
the women to the original picture. Contrasting, the males were recognized better by a whole
body image.
Ad’s give men a view of the way that a woman “should” look, but what people don’t
realize is how edited they really are. In the video “Killing us Softly 4” Cindy Crawford even
says, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford.” She had been so photo shopped that it didn’t even
look like the person she really was. Especially in magazines, no one looks like the women in
those, not even themselves. In another ad Keira Knightley’s chest was enhanced to make her
look “sexier.” For two separate ads, Jessica Alba and Kelly Clarkson’s bodies were made smaller
because they had gained a little extra weight. You have to fit the media’s image or you will be
cropped, photo shopped, and fixed.
Using sex to sell something in advertising is nothing new. It’s used for ads in the Super
Bowl, regular day to day TV, magazines, newspapers and more, to bring more appeal to the
consumer. Although sometimes men are used, mostly its women being objectified like this. It
makes people want to buy a product more, or at least draws their attention by seeing a beautiful
woman or man with minimal clothing. These types of ads force people to be more critical of a
woman’s body. In an ad Jean Kilbourne showed in her video, there was a naked woman laying
with her back to the camera; the ad says “She’s built like all our products… Heavy where she has
to take the strain.” There was also an ad for Wonderbra including a beautiful blonde woman,
perfect chest, in just a bra with the words “I can’t cook. Who cares?” Victoria’s secret is a great
example of this; almost every one of their Ad’s includes skinny, beautiful, exotic-looking women
in minimal clothing speaking in hushed tones to portray that sexual feel. Does this work? Of
course it does, Victoria’s Secret has no problem getting customers to support their business and
make women all over the world long to be one of their models.
Shows on TV also exploit women and give a person that watches them more unrealistic
ideas and urges to do whatever it takes to be like them. Three shows in particular are Pussycat
Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders: Making the Team,
and America’s Next Top Model. I must admit that I even find myself watching these shows from
time to time. According to the article “Exploitative or harmless, shows about women draw
female fans,” by Erin White, seventy percent of their viewers are actually women and not men,
so this means women putting pressure on themselves and other women. These shows focus on a
woman’s body and not their mind. In the Making the Team, girls who are barely 100 pounds are
told they need to lose more weight. Elayne Rapping, a media critic for the Univ. at Buffalo,
studies pop culture and gender issues. She makes a good point in the article when she mentions
that these shows reinforce the fact that women feel they must put other women down to get
ahead. Rapping also states in the article that, “On the one hand, we love to look at these women
and vicariously imagine that we’re them. But deep down inside there’s something depressing
about it because we aren’t them. That’s really the contradictory nature of women’s mentality
right now.”
Not only is this portraying bad business ethics, but this type of media often leads to
people wondering how these women in the ads, shows, magazines, got the body that they have.
First and foremost, many are models. Their diets consist of the following: very little meat if any,
filtered water, protein shakes, nuts, no carbs, and mainly vegetables and salads. In addition, they
would smoke to curb their appetite, workout multiple times a day, and some not even eating
weeks before a photo shoot, episode filming, runway show, etc. These diets are easily found
online for any women that decide her body isn’t good enough, but many resort to not eating at
all. I have witnessed people watching shows and saying “Okay I’m not eating for a month now”
or, “Salads all day for me!” because they feel like they need to. This isn’t the type of thing that a
company should be selling. Although they are getting their product out, they could be causing a
multitude of other problems and they are promoting the self-consciousness of many women.
Even more than self-consciousness, these messages have even more terrible effects on
women. They sometimes cause eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia; this is now
becoming an epidemic in our country and is increasing throughout the world. In the article,
“Psychology, Marketing and Eating Disorders,” by Gerard P. Prendergast, he says that “The
pathological pursuit of the ideal body leads to eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, or
even death. Sadly, in recent times there has been an increase in the number of women suffering
from eating disorders in the western world.” Prendergast also says “Eating disorders arise due to
an individuals distorted perception of their own body image.” Girls feel the need to fit in with
this society view, and double zeros are now a common size in stores. Women have body shame
and often times their mood plummets when they realize this is society wants you to look like. In
the article “Depicting Women as Sex Objects in Television Advertising: Effects on Body
Dissatisfaction,” by Desiree Tygart, she talks about how being bigger isn’t a good thing; “Once,
pleasantly plump was considered beautiful, currently a slender physique is what is considered
ideal.” Marilyn Monroe is the most famous sex symbol of all time and she wore a size 14; today
you could never imagine that, a girl would feel too fat. Media tells her that she needs to look a
certain way and that a very good way of obtaining that is buying their products and changing
herself to fit into that product or work the product well.
All of these women are being treated as objects and not a human being; in a sense it is
taking their life. Jean Kilbourne says in her video, “Turning a human being into a thing is almost
always the first step in justifying violence against a person.” Now I’m not saying that the way
media portrays women is directly related to violence, but it not something that you can
completely rule out. How far will a company go to sell a product? How much more do they have
to objectify women? But the media continues to tell us that this is okay, dehumanizing a woman,
and they are lying about the fixings behind it all.
If you were to look at this type of advertising from a business ethics stand point, you
would know that it is not ethical and no one would really find it to be. Making a woman seem
less than human in order to sell a product better is not acceptable. Sure there are some pluses to
advertising that way, and I’m sure a lot of men enjoy looking at these types of advertisements,
but there is no real benefit to women. Because of the way they are portrayed in these Ads, men
look at them differently. To take a woman’s body and pick it apart, make it what in the media’s
eyes is perfect, and paste it onto an advertisement to sell a product, seems so low. Looking at it
from a moral standpoint, it is terrible to have women half naked, fawning over men, practically
selling their bodies in order to sell a product. Exposing a woman’s body in that way has never
been seen as a good thing, and it definitely wouldn’t be considered ethical; enforcing that
thought, is the struggles that women go through because of media exposure. It may bring in the
money, but it is not ethical.
Some steps are being taken to look at the ethics behind this type of advertising and
selling, although a complete end may not be plausible, and people are speaking out. The FCC,
Federal Communications Commission, is attempting to get ethical codes for media and
advertising. They are also enforcing penalties against media indecency. The FCC won’t accept
this treatment because it is not ethical and they want a change. Kate Winslet was on the cover of
GQ Magazine in January 2003 where her body was extremely photo shopped to make her seem
thinner. She commented on the cover saying, “I can tell you they’ve reduced the size of my legs
by about a third,” and “I don’t look like that and I don’t desire to look like that.” Jean Kilbourne
also speaks out, not only do her videos do a great job, but her lectures all over the world show
some guts. A lot of girls fall into the peer pressure of the media and ads, but it only takes a few to
be aware and make others aware as well.
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