Mirror, Mirror on the Wall/ Who's the Fairest of them all?

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Since when did being underweight mean being sexy? In “Constructing Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising”, Kilbourne stated that, “Twenty years ago fashion models weighed 8% less than the average female. Today, models weigh 23% less than the average female” (Cortese 56). I remember in history class I learned that at one time, I’m not sure of what time or place, women who were a lot curvier and voluptuous, were seen as high class because they can afford to eat everyday compared to other lower class women of that time. So how come women need to starve themselves to the point of sickly, to be sexy? The answer is magazines and its advertisements; young women are lead to this belief because of culprits like Seventeen magazine. In “Cutting Girls Down” by Jean Kilbourne, “Seventeen magazine…sells these girls to advertisers in an ad that says, ‘She’s the one you want. She’s the one we’ve got. It’s more than a magazine. It’s her life’” (131). Those words are so mind-controlling for young girls who are trying to find their identity turn to this magazine and are forced to believe what these advertisers are true about what is “beautiful.” So there must be a way to change this catastrophe.

As stated in Jane Kilbourne’s “Cutting Girls Down to Size,” Jane Brown and her colleagues came to a conclusion after years of research that mass media are significant sex educators for American teens (148). An example of the mass media’s “education” for young teenagers is an article on the Huffington Post website about a model by the name of Rose Cordero. Everything about this article is the opposite of how our mainstream media should be. She is a model and 19 years old, what ever happened to getting your education first? Oh, she’s 19 and pregnant?! What does this tell young girls who read this? To start having sex when their 14? And the last thing that is wrong about this article is that, “Cordero's biggest achievement to date has been becoming the first solo black model to grace the cover of French Vogue since 2002.” For a magazine that comes out with an issue every month, that’s at least 84 issues in between the 2002 issue and the issue that Cordero was on. Why couldn’t Vogue put more black models to grace their magazines? And with that, what about Asian, Indian, and Muslim models? This article highlights three things that I believe must change in mainstream media, ages of women as models, their sexual lifestyle, and ethnicity.

One alternative to this mainstream media that I think would be effective is Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine that she discussed in “Sex, Lies, and Advertising”. It was a magazine that was cheap enough for all women to afford and it allowed for women and advertisers to communicate and improve advertising (112). It spoke from the view of an average women, like it’s dispute with Clairol, a product which most of its readers used, and the chemicals they use in their hair dyes. Ms. published an article about it along with other news media, and only Ms. gets slammed by Clairol (114). There were also other incidents that the magazine had faced from other advertisers, which I believe was as a result of Ms. being a more feminist-type of magazine and, being in a world where only men were CEO’s, they failed. The things that Steinem’s magazine has done are something that all women’s magazines should do. The way that her magazine would attempt to talk to toy companies to get them to change their advertisement of toy trains because little girls want to not only see little boys in their ads, or how they tried to get ads of VCR’s, or how the magazine does not use cigarette ads or feminine hygiene sprays. The fact that Steinem’s magazine looks out for women in all aspects is something that our mainstream media should follow now, instead of showing women articles of 50 different positions to do in the bedroom, show them an article of the best things to do in their hometown.

Some goals that mainstream media should keep in mind is that everybody is their audience. For example, in “Commodity Lesbianism” by Danae Clark, she discusses that Lesbians are left out of the picture when mainstream media think of women and is not their primary audience (146). She describes a type of advertising called “gay window advertising,” which I understand to be a way that advertisers reach both heterosexual and homosexual consumers without the heterosexual consumer knowing that the advertisement is aimed for both parties. I don’t believe that lesbians should have to deal with media revolved around heterosexual beliefs, but it is understandable why some heterosexual people would be offended if they saw an ad of two women barely clothed holding each other. So by having “gay window advertising,” both worlds can be appealed to.

In conclusion, portrayal of women in mainstream media should take an alternative route before all the mothers around the world decide to put their 10 year old daughters in a monastery because they’ve started to play sex games and do drugs in school. It has taken control of all aspects of our life, whether it’s our day-to-day fashion, or the best foundation to use for “flawless” skin. Jean Kilbourne says in “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising“ that, “A woman is conditioned to view her face as a mask and her body as an object, as things separate from and more important than her real self, constantly in need of alteration, improvement, and disguise” (122). Women are doomed.