Beauty Myth In Sexualized Advertising

Beauty Myth

In order to ensure that the technique of sexualization in the advertising industry is truly functioning and working on the consumers is by making use of the “beauty myth”. The beauty myth sets a rather absurd beauty standard for women out there. In sexualized advertisements, beauty myth is often shown in two ways: beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism. Two of which are commonly mistaken for the other.

“Beauty pornography looks like this: The perfected woman lies prone pressing down her pelvis. Her back arches, her mouth is open, her eyes shut, her nipples erect; there is a fine spray of moisture over her golden skin. The position is female superior; the stage of arousal, the plateau phase just preceding orgasm. On the next page, a version of her, mouth open, eyes shut, is about to tongue the pink tip of a lipstick cylinder. On the page after, another version kneels in the sand on all fours, her buttocks in the air, her face pressed into a towel, mouth open, eyes shut. (...) The reader understands from them that she will have to look like that if she wants to feel like that."

In an ad for Hermes, perfume, a blond woman trussed in black leather is hanging upside down, screaming, her wrists looped in chains, mouth bound. (...) In a fashion layout in The Observer (London), five men in black menace a model, whose face in is shock, with scissors and hot iron rods. In Tatler and Harper's and Queen, "designer rape sequences (women beaten, bound and abducted, but immaculately turned out and artistically photographed)" appear. (...) The woman learns from these images that no matter how assertive she may be in the world, her private submission to control is what makes her desirable....” —Naomi Wolf,