Take a stance

Advertising is an act to calling public attention to a certain company products. Some of the practices the big advertisement companies do is to sell the product by all means necessary, even by exploiting gender, race and stereotypes. With today’s powerful media, it influences and controls a large amount of people of their perceptions, behaviors and overall thought process in what to think, act and expect in theirdaily lives.

A lot of advertisement takes advantage of women stereotype and enforces them into their product. A lot even use themas objects of sex and dehumanizes them. Just like the picture above, Lee Jeans advertising campaigns does what majority of advertisement do: have skinny women, overly exposed, in a exotic pose, and advertising their product. These gives the women to have a need to look like that for the male dominated society to be accepted. And it gives the males something to look at and fantasize about.

Even an organization like the World Wildlife Foundation is using these tactics for their cause. Worse yet, this advertisement is claimed to be racist because of the black woman who is viewed as an animal, as if their race is closer to the jungle and has no signs of humanity. Then it is guilty of overly using photoshop, making the picture less human than the message it’s trying to convey. This burst outrage to women and African Americans.

As this type of advertising goes on in media all the time, some are taking a stance. One company that stuck to my head was Dove, which we discussed in class. I further looked into Dove in their ‘Real Beauty’ campaign and found it down right outrageous that people actually complained about this campaign. The campaign shows plus size women, or what I like to call them regular women, whichfeatures real women than fake plastic models that the society is used too. But give credit with Dove because they kept up with the campaign and even took on age. They had a follow up campaign that featured older women than those young girls in the ads today. I believe that Dove is very courageous to take on such campaign and making a difference.

With these types of campaigns, more and more advertisement and media will soon follow. Take a look at Glamour magazine. They had started featuring natural beauty. It got a lot of praises, in which influenced a German magazine ‘Brigitte’ to feature only women with ‘normal figures’ after complaints of their readers indicating that they could not relate to boney women.

If more and more campaigns take a stance against unnatural ads, then more and more people can change their perception in women.

Sources:

http://blog.buffalostate.edu/fashion/merchandising/archives/2007/02/19/doves_proage_campaign/

http://www.blackcatplus.com/blog/tag/women/

http://www.kensavage.com/archives/lee-jeans-ad-lolita-half-naked/

http://laurietobyedison.com/discuss/?p=2195