Women and Advertisements Essay examples -- Beauty Media Essays Adverti

Women and Advertisements The average American is exposed to hundreds of advertisements per day. Advertisements targeted toward females have an enormous effect on women's thoughts, attitudes, perceptions, and actions. Most of the time, women don't even realize these advertisements are formulating self-image issues. These ideals surround them daily and they become naturalized to the ads. Advertising creates an entire worldview persuading women to emulate the images they see all around them. In order to create a market for their products, companies constantly prey upon women's self esteem, to feel like they aren't good enough just the way they are. This makes women constantly feel stressed out about their appearance (Moore). Advertising has a negative effect on women's body image, health, and self-esteem. Advertising creates a mythical dream world where there are no problems, everyone is beautiful, and has money to spare. Advertisements depict the way in which people think women and men are â€Å"supposed to be† (Cortese 52). Women are shown all these images as role models, which are unattainable. Females are not able to be happy with their bodies because everyday in the media they are told that they are not beautiful. The average American woman is 5 feet tall and weighs 142 pounds. When is the last time you saw a women meeting these qualifications in any advertisement? The truth is most people don't have the genetic potential to be the idealized shape and size in our culture (â€Å"Every†). Women are doomed from the beginning. The media favors one women's body type; the tall blonde with perfect, tan skin and long, beautiful hair. Because the images of women in advertisements are unattainable, it keeps them purchasing new products in their quest to be like the models they see (Moore). The actual women in these advertisements can't even match up to the image of themselves in real life. They are almost computer-generated women like in the movie Simone. Indeed, with the technology we have now, advertisers can transform a product into perfection, at the same time, misleading the consumer into seeing it as â€Å"real†, and thus permanently providing impossible standards (Ingham). More and more women are becoming dissatisfied with themselves trying to be this fantasy person created by the men in our society. This distorted view of reality, portrayed by advertisemen... ...m, corporations will do anything to make a buck, including forcing women and girls to suffer health problems, low self-esteem, depression, and the adoption of subservient roles in society. Socialism would lay the basis for women's liberation. Advertising would no longer suffocate and distort women's sense of self-worth. A society based on equality and mutual respect would finally eliminate the second-class status women have held for thousands of years (Moore). If a women can't be happy with her body than she is not able to teach her children that their bodies are beautiful. Children are taught that fat is unlikable. They assume that all fat people eat all the time, are dirty, lazy, stupid, cheaters, and other negative images. Advertisers need to take into consideration the changing roles and sizes of women in society. Society is starting to accept other cultures, religions, and races, but they still don't accept people that don't have fit the â€Å"normal† body size. Beaut y is in the eye of the beholder, but if advertisements helped reinforce the many different definitions of beauty it would decrease the number of women who have poor body image, low-self esteem, and health problems.