Building Industries with our Insecurities

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Recommended: Female objectification in advertising

Building Industries with our Insecurities

Advertisements such as the iPANT instill anxiety and insecurity in women, this ad implies that this product can correct the appearance of cellulite and construct a bulge-free silhouette. The iPant flaunts a beautiful, flawless, slender woman wearing their shapewear insinuating that you too can shape and sculpt your body to perfection. A nagging question I have would be why would this woman need shapewear? The product is only from your waist to the bottom of her thighs and yet she is slender and toned all over. Where is her cellulite? What needed to be shaped and sculpted? Instead of asking ourselves to logically question the idea they are selling, we just blindly go along with whatever these advertisers are selling because we want to look like the ideal women depicted. It not only tells us that we are flawed but what “true beauty” looks like. This causes both men and women to have completely warped notions of an ideal woman. These pervasive images prey on women’s insecurities about their body image and forces them to scrutinize each body part separately to achieve an unattainable goal of perfection. Women come in all shapes and sizes but you’d never know it from looking at these ads. Women have always been measured by cultural ideals of beauty and advertising exploits and reinforces stereotypes of women as sex objects.
Although this ad targets insecure women from their teens all the way up to their 30’s, it also affects women and men of all ages. The company Wacoal claims its mantra is to make women look and feel their best however, all of them are slender, toned and flawless. These advertisers tell us what beauty is. When women buy into this image, they starve and purge themselves to ac...

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...cally look at these claims to beauty and flawlessness and take off our rose-colored glasses when seeing these “perfect” women. See the ad for what it is, a digitally retouched image that they have constructed by removing all blemishes, wrinkles, stray hair, pores, dark under eye circles with airbrushing and bleaching their teeth white. There are a few companies out there that are taking the small steps forward to portray women with rounder curves that are more realistic. We have a ways to go before ads show women of all sizes but taking cues from companies like Dove would be a good start. The reality is that no one feels perfect and flawless. Even these women we view in the ads suffer from body shame. True beauty is loving yourself and knowing that it is not only reflected in your physical attributes or how others view you but how you view yourselves as a whole.

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