“Sex sells” a classic cliché seen used in advertising strategies across the market has successfully captured an impressionable audience that can not seem to look away. Wherever your eyes take you, companies are shown objectifying images of women in their ads, and growing to become so commonplace that they are deemed acceptable; however having damaging effects on young women’s perception of their self images.
With the growing power and uses of technology, companies are utilizing it to target raw, inexperienced consumers. Commonly targeted for these reasons, Kilbourne discusses how adolescents “are in the process of learning their values and roles and developing their self-concepts. Most teenagers are sensitive to peer pressure and find it difficult to resist or even to question the dominant cultural messages perpetuated and reinforced by the media. Mass communication has made possible a kind of national peer pressure that erodes private and individual values and standards, as well as community values and standards (Kilbourne 258).” It seems as if the abilities of companies to advertise to a consumer and project images and messages in efforts to sell their product are unstoppable. Whether a young female is checking her Myspace page, watching television, or flipping through a magazine, she is bombarded with advertisements of females stripped nearly down to their birthday suites to sell one product or another. The product being pitched could be geared towards either the male or female consumer, but having young females exposed to such objectifying images can negatively effect their perception of the way she needs to look and act in this sex selling market and society.
The ramifications of a media and marketing industry driven by such objectifying sexual images could be and are already showing to be incredibly harmful to our young female population. Wolf discusses females developing distorted vision of beauty, noting that “The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see (Wolf 125).” Not only are women loosing their ability to construct their own ideas of what is beautiful, they are also loosing self respect for their own images and image as a whole.
Bibliography
Gender, race and class in media Sage publications, 2nd ed. California 2002
Chapter III. Gender and women’s bodies
