Gender Representation in Advertisements

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Recommended: How do advertisements contribute to the body image of women

I have to admit I am an avid reader of magazines. I read everything from the the stupid celebrity gossip magazines to Time magazine and National Geographic. Since our brief overview of magazine advertisements in class, I decided to look into how magazines make us think and more specifically I wanted to see how the magazine advertisements portray women, since that has been a hot topic for a while now. I like analyzing advertisements and looking at how viewers react to specific advertisements that may or may not be targeted toward them. The question I wanted to research was “How are different genders and sexualities represented in magazine advertisements?”, but I figured it was too broad for this assignment so I narrowed it down to: “How are women represented in magazines and magazine advertisements, and how is beauty portrayed?” I also wanted to touch on how gay women are represented, and I will towards the end of this paper.
What really got me interested in this topic was learning how advertisements and magazines like Seventeen effect girls’ self-esteem in health class many years ago. I actually decided I may want to pursue a career in advertising, so I know all of this knowledge will be helpful. What overall sparked this question however, was the discussion we had in class about advertising and the in-class exercises we did that made us look at advertisements in our own way. Lastly, I decided to write about women in magazines and magazine advertisements because lately there has been a lot of controversy over how women are portrayed and what the “ideal” woman looks according to advertisers. So, to answer my question I looked at many sources within the Academic Search Complete database and found one great article titled: “The ...

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...or another article that strayed away from my topic but answered the question “How are lesbian women portrayed in magazines and magazine advertisements?”. I was hoping to find that there was a difference between the way gay women are represented versus straight women, but I found that it is quite similar given that the women most often look the same and are portrayed in a artificial way.

Works Cited

Lim, Weng M., and Ding H. Ting. "The Construction of Beauty in Malay Magazine Advertisements." Contemporary Management Research, Sept. 2011. Web.
Moeran, Brian. "Advertising and the Technology of Enchantment: The Portrayal of Beauty in Women's Fashion Magazines." Openarchive.cbs.dk. Copenhagen Business School, June 2009. Web.
Skorek, Mał Gorzata. “A Thin Line between Being Straight or Gay: Portrayal of Lesbian Women in Advertising”. Praeger, n.d. Web. 02 Dec. 2013.

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