Dead Women as Role Models for the Adolescent Girls, Photoshop for the Elderly and Aging Women. Post #3.

Miley Cyrus for Marc Jacobs 2014
Note: Dead girl in background.
Miley is a role model for many young women.

       “Advertising is an over $130 billion a year industry and affects all of us throughout our lives. We are exposed to over 1500 ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful education force in society. The average adult will spend one and one-half years of his/her life watching television commercials.” (Kilbourne, 121). Given this statistic, advertising affects everyone in one way or another, positively or negatively, knowingly or unknowingly. It is hard to escape advertising, considering viewers are exposed to it involuntarily, such as within the context of watching a television show or walking around a New York City Street and being subjected to billboards. With that being said, advertisers and all parties involved are extremely powerful and are a dominant force in constructing the way many people view the world, let alone buying decisions. Advertisements exist only to persuade consumers to buy whatever product or service is being sold, and sometimes it is at the cost of society’s morals and values. What is particularly troublesome about this, is that as a result of living in a consumer society surrounded by provocative advertisements, it may inadvertently compromise the innocence of young children or even distort reality for adolescents. Young people are more vulnerable to advertising’s false promises simply because much of advertising is targeted toward them. In Jean Kilbourne’s book, Deadly Persuasion, she backs up this point nicely with, “Girls are extremely desirable to advertisers because they are new consumers, are beginning to have significant disposable income, and are developing brand loyalty that might last a lifetime. Teenage girls spend over $4 billion annually on cosmetics alone.” (Kilbourne, 131). It’s no wonder that advertisers will use illusive imagery as a tactic to make people, especially adolescents, feel inadequate or insecure about their bodies, because these people are a goldmine. With so much money at stake, the presentation of ideal femininity and masculinity have been present in advertisements for decades and have morphed in to something quite unrealistic. Advertisements are part of culture, and they effectively shape peoples’ perception on what it means to be male or female, rich or poor, and black or white. This would not be so bad if “sex sells” weren’t the motto of advertisements. What’s more, is that the effects that this has on young people are not all that we have to worry to worry about.

Victoria Beckham for Marc Jacobs, 2008.
Model has body in real life.

  Cortese says this in chapter three of his book, Constructed Bodies, about gender display relations, “What kind of representations does advertising produce? It creates a mythical, WASP- oriented world in which no one is ever ugly, overweight, poor, toiling, or physically or mentally disabled—the ways in which we think men and women behave—not the ways they actual do behave (Goffman 1976).” (Cortese, 52) Indeed, Cortese is accurate in his description of gender display representations, but taking it a step further, gendered advertising also has the tendency to utilize tropes of stereotypical sexism and uses unattainable “ideal” imagery of the female body and worst of all, violence against women. Truthfully, gendered advertising can still be as mild as a housewife, cleaning the house with her favorite Clorox product, which implies the historical notion that this is all women should ever strive to do, and of course, women are not the only ones who do the cleaning and shopping anymore, we’re working too. But the opposite end of the spectrum is truly disturbing, and makes 1950’s sexist tropes in advertising seem harmless. It is now commonplace for females to be portrayed as sex objects, or even cut down to mere body parts, or having a gaunt like appearance, invoking the look of death. While men often appear as confident and dominant in ads, women’s legs are hanging out of Marc Jacobs bags. James B. Twitchell of Adcult USA is spot on in his opinion, “Advertising has become sexual harassment,” (Cortese, 30). When women are displayed like so in advertising, it is precisely sexual harassment, especially because we are subjected to this overtly sexualized images of our gender, most often involuntarily. The simple fact that it is illegal to walk around completely naked in most of the United States, makes the use of mostly nude or extremely sexualized models or actors in advertising seem contradictory and invasive.

Britney Spears for Candies, 2010.
 Before & After Photoshop.
Appears more realistic in real life.

There is a shocking amount of evidence to support that advertising only casts “beautiful” women. Apparently, in order for a female model/actor to be featured in an advertisement for any type of product or service, their appearance must meet the criteria of a white, skinny, long legged, long hair, blue eyes, wrinkle and blemish free,and under the age of 30. Obviously, this is not representative of the people that are being advertised to. It is important to consider that some women do not compare themselves to the bodies presented in advertisements, and some people think that they are psychologically sound and remain unaffected by the images they are bombarded with. Jean Kilbourne begs to differ, and believes that it does not matter how mentally strong one seems to be, messages in advertising directed toward young women still contribute to one’s self image. She says, “Advertising doesn’t cause eating problems, of course, any more than it causes alcoholism. Anorexia in particular is a disease with a complicated etiology, and media images probably don’t play a major role. However, these images certainly contribute to the body-hated so many young women feel and to some of the resulting eating problems,” (Kilbourne, 135). When advertising portrays ideal femininity in packaged in extremely thin and “perfectly” beautiful female bodies, and is subjected to young minds, or even all people repetitively, it’s very difficult to assess what the outcome may be, and is an obvious problem and hot debate in our society. Now, the industries for self-reconstruction are so highly profitable, and they most likely have advertising to thank for it. The cosmetics industry, the plastic surgery industry, and the dieting industry, are all some how making billions of dollars, which does not help the debate of advertising not contributing to peoples’ sense of self worth and image. The imagery found in advertising, that of which thin, young and airbrushed skin is certainly in demand by people of all demographics.

Gabby Sidibe, 2009
Appears noticibly darker in real life.

Women who are physically larger in size and women who are older in age are mostly absent from advertisements, even though they make up a great deal of the population and hold significant buying power. It is only within the past couple of decades that women of color are included in advertisements. Alas, advertisers are inspired by these physical “maladies” and use them to exploit these “problems” into persuading them to cure their aging faces and widening hips by purchasing the product in the ad. With the constant bombardment of models that embody the “ideal femininity” and claim that the product being advertised works miracles, almost everyone falls victim to participating in the race to end aging and weight gain. With advances in technology, photoshop is exactly what killed the older and “overweight” women in advertisements. Even worse, women of color are prone to appearing lighter in ads than they appear in real life.It is so hard to find an older woman in an advertisement without hits of airbrushing to her crows feet. “This censorship extends beyond women’s magazines to any image of an older woman: Bob Ciano, once art direct of Life magazine, says that “no picture of a woman goes un-retouched…even a well-known [older] woman goes un-retouched…we still persist in trying to make her look like she’s in her fifties.” The effect of this censorship of a third of the female life span is clear to Heyn: “By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60-year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60-year-old readers look in the mirror and think they look too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.” (Wolf, 83).

Sarah Jessica Parker, 2012
Appears older in real life.

Cortese explains to us in his book, Constructed Bodies, that we as consumers in a capitalist society and participants of a commodity driven culture are in part to blame for the existence of the “ideal” women. “The notion of the ideal women is a social construct, it did not impose itself on an unwilling culture. Advertising reflects the traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and practices of our society and a culture based on commodities. Advertising articulates and channels cultural acts, but it does not create artificial desires nor mandate behavioral patterns.” (Cortese, 32). It’s true, advertisements show us humans interacting with one another, speaking our language, and selling us products that we genuinely enjoy using, which makes Cortese somewhat accurate in his hypothesis that everyone is responsible for the imagery in advertising. This makes advertisements feel more as reality than fiction, as the imagery in advertising is not real, but the product or lifestyle choices that are being sold are real, because these products and desires become part of peoples lives, and they invoke human emotion.
With present day advertising being so entangled in sexism, racism, and power hierarchies, even in the subtlest form, it seems like nothing will ever change on Madison Avenue. If some studies suggest that from 40-80 percent of fourth-grade girls are dieting (Kilbourne, 134) and most of them are not overweight, America needs a serious cultural intervention and needs to think about what we want for America’s children. Is it fair for us, let alone children to be subjected to hyper-sexual or hyper-violent advertisements? Even if parents do a good job sheltering their children, they cannot be protected forever. There are a few ways to go about rehabilitating strategies that are used in advertising, and it is to be assumed that all alternatives will receive backlash. First, magazines with target audiences of young women and girls need the most regulation on the use of image containing females. It is a long shot to suggest that all of these magazines include images and advertisements of girls and women who are not actually models, or to completely nix cosmetic and weight loss ads from them completely. This will probably never happen, as the print industry would retaliate this proposal because they would lose precious income from advertisers, leading some magazines to cease circulation and henceforth leaving many people unemployed. Besides the obvious casualties, would this actually be such a bad thing for American culture? After all, it is a scientific fact that the brain is not fully developed until age 24. In Gloria Steinem’s Sex, Lies, and Advertising, she talks about how difficult it was to acquire advertisements that were not entirely made up of women’s products to support Ms. magazine, she proves that we as a female audience are truly just “women’s products” consumers to advertisers, and nothing else, really. 
Another strategy that could be implemented, are the use of disclaimers in advertising, similar to the ones that cigarettes have. Such disclaimers could say, “This image was altered with Photoshop,” or “The actors portrayed in this advertisement are structured representations of fictional characters and are not to be confused with reality.” The problem with disclaimers are, that people have to take the time to read them, and that images are always more potent in their impression. Until disclaimers say, “This ad may psychologically distort reality for people under the age of 100,” they might not ever work.

Jimmy Choo, 2010
Model appears to be living in real life.

Clearly, stronger regulations need to be placed on the advertising industry and all media outlets, with the interest of the physical and psychological well-being of the citizens of planet earth. Even simple things can be effective, such as media outlets regulating the amount of advertisements for cosmetics of all kinds, along with diet products, and overtly sexualized or gendered advertisements, that may be included in any given medium of entertainment. If the number were smaller than it is currently, it’s likely to have a positive effect on the health of our culture and the health of our world. The same goes for photoshopped advertisements, there needs to be less of it, or the implementation of shocking disclaimers. 
Cortese is right, it is everyone’s (adult) responsibility that all advertisements continue to circulate. We allow ourselves and others to witness sexually explicit, sexist, racist, and patriarchal advertising. The least that can be done is to help educate young people on what they are seeing, especially when real products are being advertised to them in the context of an alternate reality. It is not moral or even lawful to use anyones body as an object, unless of course both are consenting partners, but it begs the question that we all must ask ourselves, which is, are we consenting sexual partners to the advertisements that we see? Are we consenting racists, sexist, or white supremacists? 

Works Cited 

Cortes, Anthony J. "Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising." Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007. 45-76. Print. 

Kilbourne, Jean. "Beauty and the Beast of Advertising." Media&Values. 49 (Winter 1990): 121-5. Print. 

Kilbourne, Jean.  "The More You Subtract, the More You Add." Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising. Free Press, 1999. 128-154. Print. 

Steinem, Gloria. "Sex, Lies and Advertising." 1990: 112-20. Print.