Love Your Body

According to Jean Kilbourne, “advertising is an over $130 billion year industry and affects all of us throughout our lives” (Kilbourne, 121). Before reading this article, I would have ardently denied the influence of advertisement in my life because we all know they are just trying to persuade us to buy their products. However, as I thought about this topic, I realized how our life is, in fact, impacted by advertisements more specifically women.

Women are shown almost exclusively as housewives or sex objects” (Kilbourne, 122). I recently saw a spanish commercial featuring Sophia Vergara promoting her clothes line at Kmart, average women talking in Vergara’s voice tell the audience “If you look like a woman, dress like a woman” but what does it mean to look like a woman? This affects women because they have to compare themselves to models and actresses who fit the norm of what a woman is supposed to look like. Like Anthony Cortese  said “The perfect provocateur is not human; rather, she is a form or hollow shell representing a female figure…. Women are constantly held to this unrealistic standard of beauty” (Cortese, 54).

So what can be done?Raise awareness, sharing this information with other women can lead them to demand for better advertising. Companies can create positive ads that show women and girls confident in their body. 

Source: Love Your Body

Source: Love Your Body

These positive images will empower women and girls. They will not feel pressure to be a size 0 and still have big breast. They will realize that they do not need to buy make - up to look beautiful or to feel beautiful, perhaps when this happens women will be able to truly break the glass ceiling.

Another way to change advertisement, is to find different means to share ideas. The internet is a great way to share ideas because it is not confined to a set of rules which means companies can stop stereotyping and objectifying to share new ideas. 

This video shows how interaction in the internet can help spread an idea, maybe companies can start a new way of advertisement that will make its consumers feel like they are interacting with a product or whatever it is they are promoting.