[edit] This thread is NOT just about sickeningly skinny models and overweight people. It's more than about weight. It's about different advertising techniques and personal stories and discussion. The article presented is to help kick us off.
If you have disagreements, present them KINDLY and constructively.
You turn into a flippin' screaming person and I'll tell on you ^.^
[original] The excerpt is about how women (and men) are portrayed in advertising and how products are sold to them. It's quite sickening...All a big mind game to screw with our heads and sell crap. Grrr...
I got the following from http://www.tc.umn.edu/~rein0012/5472.NMedia/Mod6.Ad/propaganda.html
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Advertising and the Beauty IndustryAdvertising also promotes a whole range of products associated with the beauty industry, who target early adolescent females with idealized notions and models of femininity achieved through these products. Drawing on a discourse of femininity, advertising attempts to create a
sense of inadequacy-that one is imperfect without a certain product. It also attempts to establish a sense of membership in imaginary communities of consumption with others, a "synthetic personalization" with a mass audience treated as an individual "you" to create a "synthetic sisterhood."
The video, What a Girl Wants, (video clip):
http://mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderAndDiversity/WhatAGirlWants/studyguide/htmldocuments the ways in which advertising using celebrity females such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore and Jessica Simpson to promote these idealized images of femininity for females to emulate.
Jean Kilbourne, a leading critic of these ads, in her Killing Us Softly3 video (video clip):
http://mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderAndDiversity/KillingUsSoftly3/studyguide/htmland the video, Slim Hopes (video clip):
http://mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderAndDiversity/SlimHopesmakes the following points in the teacher's guide accompanying the Killing Us Softly3 video:
- Because of the prevalence of advertising in our culture, the sheer amount of cultural space it occupies, it is crucial to examine and understand the stories advertising tells us about femininity and what it means to be a woman.
- In addition to products, advertising attempts to sell women the myth that they can, and should, achieve physical perfection to have value in our culture.
- As advertising pushes its objects, it turns women's bodies into objects, often dismembering them with excessive focus on just one part of the body to sell a product.
- Advertisers themselves acknowledge that they sell more than products, that the images in advertising are designed to affect the way we see our lives.
- Men and women inhabit very different worlds. Men's bodies are not routinely scrutinized, criticized and judged in the way that women's bodies are.
- There is a tremendous amount of contempt for women who don't measure up to the advertisers' ideal of beauty. This is particularly true for older women and women who are considered overweight.
- Media images of female beauty influence everyone. They influence how women feel about themselves, and they influence how men feel about the real women in their lives.
- Little girls and teenagers are increasingly sexualized in advertisements. A growing number of ads are reminiscent of child pornography.
- The negative and distorted image of women in advertising affects not only how men feel about women but also how men feel about anything labeled "feminine" in themselves.
- In general, human qualities are divided up, polarized, and labeled "masculine" and "feminine," with the "feminine" consistently devalued.
- In recent years, computer retouching has become a primary technique used by advertisers. Before photographs are published, they are digitally retouched to make the models appear perfect. Complexion is cleaned up, eye lines are softened, chins, thighs and stomachs are trimmed, and neck lines are removed. Computers can even create faces and bodies of women who don't exist.
- The objectification of women in advertisements is part of a cultural climate in which women
are seen as things, as objects.
- Turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying
violence against that person.
- Most women who have had breast implants lose sensation in their breasts, so their breasts
become an object of someone else's pleasure rather than pleasurable in themselves. The
woman literally moves from being a subject to being an object.
- As girls reach adolescence, they get the message that they should not be too powerful,
should not take up too much space. They are told constantly that they should be less than
what they are.
- At least 1 in 5 young women in America today has an eating disorder.
- One recent study of fourth grade girls found that 80% of them were on diets.
- Twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8% less than the average woman. Today,
the average model weighs 23% less than the average woman.
- Only 5% of women have the body type (tall, genetically thin, broad-shouldered, narrow-
hipped, long-legged and usually small-breasted) seen in almost all advertising. (When the
models have large breasts, they've almost always had breast implants.)
- The obsession with thinness is used to sell cigarettes.
- 4 out of 5 women are dissatisfied with their appearance.
- Almost half of American women are on a diet on any given day.
- 5-10 million women are struggling with serious eating disorders.
- The American food industry spends $36 billion on advertising each year.
- Women's magazines are full of ads for rich foods and recipes.
- Eating has become a moral issue. Words such as "guilt" and "sin" are often used to sell
food.
- Americans spend more than $36 billion dollars on dieting and diet-related products each
year.
- 95% of all dieters regain the weight they lost, and more, within five years.
- Articles about the dangers of diet products are often contradicted by advertisements for
diet products within the same magazine.
- Sex is frequently used to sell food. Many ads eroticize food and normalize bingeing. These
ideas support dangerous eating-disordered behaviors.
- There are many images in advertising that silence women - images that show women with
their hands over their mouths and other visuals, as well as copy, that strip women of their
voices.
- The body language of young women and girls in advertising is usually passive and
vulnerable. Conversely, the body language of men and boys is usually powerful, active and
aggressive.
- When girls are shown with power in advertising, it is almost always a very masculine
definition of power.
- Often the power that women are offered in advertising is silly and trivial.
- Women are often infantilized in advertisements, producing and reinforcing the sense that
they should not grow up, resist becoming a mature sexual being, and remain little girls.
- Advertisements rarely feature women over the age of 35, and there are many
advertisements for beauty products that claim to help women continue to look young, even
when they no longer are.
- Increasingly, advertisements show women as victims of sexual harassment and violence.
- Violence against women is normalized by advertisements.
- Women live in a world defined by the threat of sexual violence and intimidation. The
portrayal of women in advertising supports, rather than objects to, these threats.
- Masculinity in advertising is often linked with violence, brutality and ruthlessness. Men are
constantly portrayed as the perpetrators of violence.
- Violence, hostility and dominance are often presented as erotic, attractive and appealing in
advertising.
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There's a bit more to this article. See the link at the top for the rest. I just thought this part was the most informing.
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