Hypersexualization In Advertising Essay

The advertising industry has become a notable staple of marketing in the modern era. From oversized billboards to television commercial sessions, advertising has taken up a strongly dominant role in contemporary life, through which information is repeatedly broadcast and eventually embedded into the minds of potential consumers. Under the influence of such advertisements, consumers become more susceptible to emotional appeal and more receptive to the views expressed by these commercials, thus leading to a possible shift in their personal values and opinions. Therefore, although the main focus of these advertisements primarily falls upon the products themselves, it is the warped portrayals of the sexes and the concept of gendered marketing that

Objectification of the female body has long plagued advertisements for products ranging from perfume to fast food, in which advertisers depict women in a sexual light, marketed towards appealing to the male gaze. While the passivity of this sexualized female role has recently shifted to accommodate more “active, desiring sexual subjects” (Gill 255), women who are “powerful and playful, rather than passive and victimized” (Gill 258), it is still remarkable to note how “the continued history and presence of women in decorative and sexual roles have generated much interest and controversy than similar portrayals of men” (Sheehan 101). Freeman and Merskin point out in “Having It His Way: The Construction of Masculinity in Fast-Food TV Advertising” that fast food commercials sometimes depict meat as synonymous with female flesh, both being “mutual objects of male desire” (Freeman and Merskin 470) and “objects of the camera’s implied heterosexual male gaze” (Freeman and Merskin 470). The issues presented within these representations of women are that they are unrealistic in strengthening the concept of power imbalances between the sexes and in reinforcing standards of beauty and fitness that are not easily attainable. By presenting the genders with an array of limits as such, the sexualization and normalization of “inequality, domination, and even violence” (Caputi 312) occur, allowing advertising to influence adolescents much like propaganda does, by “[reinforcing] or [modifying] the attitudes or behavior” (Portia 42) of its target groups to form uniform masses of consumers, ultimately disregarding any differences that make every individual unique, and encouraging its demographics to do the