Stylish Sexism: Hypersexualization in Today’s Advertising

In today’s consumerist society, our media promotes the mindset that material goods will result in ultimate success. Advertising has infiltrated almost every part of the average person’s lives, especially now in the technological age where computers and smart phones have become inseparable from their owners. Given the fact that an average teenager spends 50% of their day consuming media, it is no surprise that they are exposed to 500 ads a day (Statistics). The problem comes when the media promotes a lifestyle that hinders the lives of a group of people. The sexualized images shown in ads, are regarded as “fashion” and “art” while they, in reality, promote the sexism that has ravaged humanity for as long as people have existed. The hypersexualization in advertising is detrimental to today’s culture as it promotes an obscured standard of beauty, resulting in mental and physical harm to society- especially in women.

The goal of an advertisement is simple: to convince an audience to think a certain way. Advertisers will use a variety of techniques to persuade the consumer to buy a product. One such technique is the “beautiful person” technique, which uses a stunning model to present a product to the audience, who believes that they too, could look beautiful if they had that particular product. This is common in media, as companies use celebrity endorsements and models all of the time. However, society’s view of “beauty” is a small, and unrealistic goal, which many people- especially women, try to achieve. The models that are considered “perfect” and “the standard of beauty” are in reality, photoshopped, tweaked and made over until they transform into the unrealistic goals plastered across almost every media platform. However, women...

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... At some degree we have a responsibility to project the right image to a certain extent. But will that sell a magazine?” Jill Ishkanian from U.S Weekly in the same documentary said that what she did was “art” because she “could make people interested in you when there is nothing interesting about you.”

Media is an unavoidable part of our culture. The age old question is whether society shapes media or whether the media shapes society. In regards to advertising, it seems as though the companies shape how women view themselves and set the standards of beauty. These standards can cause women to take drastic measures to feel accepted in a culture that revolves around physical beauty, risking damage to their physical and mental health in the process. The advertising industry should reform to explore the complexity that is beauty, allowing all women to feel beautiful.