The Use of Women in Advertisement

According to most advertisements, good looks, success and sexual drive are among the top attributes one must possess in order to be accepted. Each ad has a product to sell whether it be a large object like a car or something small like perfume.; however, past the obvious product to client pitch there is an underlying message of what people should look and strive to be like. In Jack Solomon’s article, “Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” he says advertisements, “ are designed to exploit the discontentment’s fostered by the American dream” (525); therefore, claiming that the American society creates an ideal world to live in and is continuously hounded by the media to fight its cultural values by raising the standard of acceptance. The articles analyzed and compared in this essay are from Rolling Stones and Elle magazine; both advertisements sell perfume but to different audiences. Although both sell the same type of product, the Rolling Stones ad for Curve cologne uses sexual and chauvinistic ideals of women to intrigue men to buy their merchandise, while the Elle ad for Beauty perfume illustrates how beautiful and seductive a girl must be, in order to sell their fragrance to women. Both articles present clear cases of how the media uses advertisements of ordinary products to manipulate our perceptions of how women should be portrayed in everyday life.

The first advertisement promotes Curve cologne for men. The background color is a basic blue that contrasts with the yellow writing and white outline of the brand name on top. Covering a large portion of the page is a very attractive blonde haired, blue eyed girl. She is wearing white, skimpy, lingerie and has a teasing smirk on her face accompanied with...

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...shaping a societies culture. Hopefully, people will start to build a new status quo that incorporates not only the beauty of a person but the intellect as well. In order to learn more about this topic I would like to further investigate how other countries cultural values compare and differ from our own. Do they have a different ideology? Is media as influential or important as it is here? It might also be intriguing to find out how much advertisements contribute to the status of our economy. Even though there are more commercials on television, does the new technology of recording shows and fast forwarding through commercials effect the economy? Furthermore, it would be great to see the evolution of advertisements go from scandalous and suggestive, to moral and believable. As for now, what you see isn’t always what you get when it comes to advertisements.