Sexism and Sexuality in Advertising

§1. Women's bodies have been used whole, or in parts, to market everything from
brassieres to monkey wrenches. One effect of such ads is to give women unrealistic notions
of what they should look like. After instilling anxiety and insecurity in women, the ads imply
that buying consumer products can correct practically any defect, real or imagined. Moreover,
5 the women's magazines that could be telling the truth about such marketplace fraud are
largely co-opted by their advertisers. Nor are men immune from exploitation. As more
idealized male bodies appear in ads, men may, at last, really understand what upsets women
about the way they are depicted in ads. In addition to reinforcing sexist notions about ideal
woman and manhood, ads exploit sexuality. Many products are pitched with explicit sexual
10 imagery that borders on pornography. Not only do these ubiquitous images encourage us to
think of sex as a commodity, but they often reinforce stereotypes of women as sex objects
and may contribute to violence against women.

How Advertising Portrays Women

§2. Fourteen year-old Lisa arranges herself in the mirror – tightening her stomach,
15 sucking in her cheeks, puffing her lips into an approximation of a seductive pout. It's no use,
she thinks, as she glances down at the open magazine on her dresser table. I'll never look
like the women in the ads. She flips through the pages, studying the beautiful women with
their slender hips, flawless skin, and silky hair. Well, maybe if I lost twenty pounds, she thinks,
pinching her baby-fat tummy with an acid feeling of despair. Or if I had the right clothes and
20 makeup...
§3. EVERYWHERE WE TURN, ADVERTISEMENTS tell us what it means to be a
desirable man or woman. For a man, the message is manifold: he must be powerful, rich,
confident, athletic. For a woman, the messages all share a common theme: She must be
"beautiful." Advertising, of course, did not invent the notion that women should be valued as
25 ornaments; women have always been measured against cultural ideals of beauty. But
advertising has joined forces with sexism to make images of the beauty ideal more pervasive,
and more unattainable, than ever before.
§4. In her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf compares the contemporary ideal
of beauty to the Iron Maiden, a medieval torture device that enclosed its victims in a spike-
30 lined box painted with a woman's image. Like the Iron Maiden, the beauty ideal enforces
conformity to a single, rigid shape. And both cause suffering – even death – in their victims.
§5. The current Iron Maiden smiles at us from the pages of Vogue magazine. She's a
seventeen-year-old professional model, weighing just 120 pounds on a willowy 5'10" frame.
Her eyes are a deep violet-blue, her teeth pearly white. She has no wrinkles, blemishes – or
35 even pores, for that matter. As media critic Jean Kilbourne observes in Still Killing Us Softly,
her groundbreaking film about images of women in advertising, "The ideal cannot be
achieved; it is inhuman in its flawlessness. And it is the only standard of beauty – and worth –
for women in this culture."'
§6. The flawlessness of the Iron Maiden is, in fact, an illusion created by makeup
40 artists, photographers, and photo retouchers. Each image is painstakingly worked over: Teeth
and eyeballs are bleached white; blemishes, wrinkles, and stray hairs are airbrushed away.
According to Louis Grubb, a leading New York retoucher, "Almost every photograph you see
for a national advertiser these days has been worked on by a retoucher to some degree ....
Fundamentally, our job is to correct the basic deficiencies in the original photograph or, in
45 effect, to improve upon the appearance of reality." In some cases, a picture is actually an
amalgam of body parts of several different models – a mouth from this one, arms from that
one, and legs from a third. By inviting women to compare their unimproved reality with the
Iron Maiden's airbrushed perfection, advertising erodes self-esteem, then offers to sell it back
– for a price.
50 §7. The price is high. It includes the staggering sums we spend each year to change
our appearance: $33 billion on weight loss; $7 billion on cosmetics; $300 million on cosmetic
surgery. It includes women's lives and health, which are lost to self-imposed starvation and
complications from silicone breast implants. And it includes the impossible-to-measure cost of
lost self-regard and limited personal horizons.

Michael F. Jacobsen
Laurie Anne Mazur
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~glhanson/readings/advertising/womeninads.htm

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 Sexism and Sexuality in Advertising
VOCABULARY
§1.
Completely: ____________________________________________________________________
Sell: __________________________________________________________________________
Soutiens-gorge: _________________________________________________________________
Clés à molette: __________________________________________________________________
Ideas: _________________________________________________________________________
Insinuating, injecting: _____________________________________________________________
Biens de consommation: __________________________________________________________
Blemish, imperfection: ____________________________________________________________
Besides: _______________________________________________________________________
Deception aimed at making people buy consumer goods: _________________________________
Controlled: ____________________________________________________________________
Free/sheltered from the threat of: ____________________________________________________
Disturbs: _______________________________________________________________________
Shown, described: _______________________________________________________________
Promoted: _____________________________________________________________________
Verges on (friser): _______________________________________________________________
Omnipresent: ___________________________________________________________________
Article of trade (bien de consommation): ______________________________________________
§2.
Rentrant son ventre:______________________________________________________________
Aspirant: _______________________________________________________________________
Swelling: _______________________________________________________________________
Something resembling: ___________________________________________________________
Moue: _________________________________________________________________________
Casts a brief look at: _____________________________________________________________
Dressing table (coiffeuse): _________________________________________________________
Advertisements: _________________________________________________________________
Browses through (parcourir): _______________________________________________________
Slim: __________________________________________________________________________
Perfect, free from imperfections: ____________________________________________________
Soyeux: _______________________________________________________________________
Puppy-fat (rondeurs d’adolescence): _________________________________________________
Belly, stomach: __________________________________________________________________
Hopelessness: __________________________________________________________________
§3.
Multiple: _______________________________________________________________________
Slim: __________________________________________________________________________
Inescapable, omnipresent: _________________________________________________________
Inaccessible: ___________________________________________________________________
§4.
Garni de pointes: ________________________________________________________________
Imposes: ______________________________________________________________________
§5.
Tall and slender:_________________________________________________________________
As white as pearls: _______________________________________________________________
Rides: _________________________________________________________________________
Defects: _______________________________________________________________________
D’ailleurs: ______________________________________________________________________
Perfection: _____________________________________________________________________
Value: _________________________________________________________________________
§6.
Very carefully: __________________________________________________________________
Elaborated:_____________________________________________________________________
Globes oculaires: ________________________________________________________________
Poils épars: ____________________________________________________________________
Effacés à l’aérographe: ___________________________________________________________
Defects: _______________________________________________________________________
§7.
Astronomic: ____________________________________________________________________
Delivered to: ____________________________________________________________________
Deprivation of food: ______________________________________________________________
Mammaires: ____________________________________________________________________
Consideration for oneself: _________________________________________________________

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 Sexism and Sexuality in Advertising
GENERAL UNDERSTANDING
Which statement is right?

This text is about the way men treat women on a daily basis
This text denounces the impact advertisements have on women’s psychology
This text praises the advertisers for showing women as they really are

DETAILED UNDERSTANDING
Cite the text to justify the following statements
 This text shows men are also beginning to suffer from the way they are portrayed in the media
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
 This text shows that women’s magazines are partly responsible for the propagation of an illusory ideal of
feminine beauty
__________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
 This text tends to prove that advertisement has an impact on sexual behaviors
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
 This text hints that advertisement have a torturing effect on the minds of women
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
 This text makes it clear that the ideal beauty in advertisements is a means to extort money
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________

GIVE EACH PARAGRAPH THE RIGHT TITLE

_) A modernized torture device

_) Artificial beauty: a costly swindle
_) What we should all look like… and can’t
_) The cost of advertisement-induced complexes
_) The despair of a 14 year-old
_) Women’s bodies made into marketing tools
_) You can’t be perfect, so you’re worthless

DISCUSSION OF THE ARTICLE

§1.
 Can you give examples of products having nothing to do with women’s bodies which still are
advertised using them?
 According to advertisements, what should women look like to deserve men’s attention?
 Are you influenced by the beauty standards the advertisers would like to hammer into people’s
heads? Do you know a person who is?
 Are the advertisements which “instill anxiety and insecurity in women” efficient? Can you cite a
particular advertising campaign of which this was the obvious goal?
 How is the ideal male described in advertisements? If you are male, do you feel any complex
towards men portrayed on ads?
 How do you understand the sentence “”these ubiquitous images encourage us to think of sex as a
commodity”?

§2.
 How would you describe the feelings of Lisa as she looks at herself in the mirror and compares
herself to the women in the magazine?
 What parts of her body does she try to modify so that she might look like those women?
 What elements in their beauty does she envy?
 Does she have any hope she might ever rival their beauty?
 What solutions does she envision to make herself more like those women?

§3.
 Do advertisements seem to require the same of women and men?
 Have advertisements changed the image of the “ideal woman”?

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 Sexism and Sexuality in Advertising
§4.
 Do you think author Naomi Wolf is right to compare the image of women propagated by the media
to a torture device? Do you think it is true that death can be the result of this contemporary torture?
 “The beauty ideal enforces conformity to a single, rigid shape”. What is this shape like?

§5.
 The “current iron maiden” has “no pore”. Isn’t that a sign of her complete artificiality?
 Why are women made to feel worthless?

§6.
 What is your feeling as you read about the way some pictures are created from various body parts
of several women?
 What do you think is the point of advertisers as they propagate the image of the “ideal woman”?

§7.
 Is the cost of the artificial ideal of beauty displayed in advertisements and magazines purely
financial?

GRAMMAR IN CONTEXT
Imagine the resolutions of Lisa as she elaborates a plan to look like the women in the magazines.
You may use the following expressions:
 I must – I mustn’t – I have to – I need to – It’s necessary for me to

CREATIVE WRITING
A woman is depressed because she wants to look like the women in magazines. Her companion tries to
cheer her up.

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