A Consideration of Some of the Effects of the Media’s Depiction of Women

On the Self-Esteem of Adolescent Girls

Lisa Napell Dicksteen

 

Stony Brook University, CEE-565 Human Development

October 2004

 

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MEDIA DEPICTIONS OF WOMEN - DICKSTEEN

Abstract

During the 20th century, advertising has, unintentionally, served as the historian for the myriad cultural shifts and changes in the lives of women. It has presented women in different roles, images, and responsibilities over time, however, one must question whether has it simply recorded what was going on in society, or has had a deliberate effect on how society views women, and how women, especially young, impressionable, adolescent women, view themselves. The contention of this paper is that advertising is not an unbiased reflector of women in society, but that it actively manipulates society’s understanding of what it means to be a woman, and that these manipulations are often harmful to the society that internalizes them.

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A Consideration of Some of the Effects of the Media’s Depiction of Women

On the Self-Esteem of Adolescent Girls

During the 20th century, advertising has, unintentionally, served as the historian for the myriad cultural shifts and changes in the lives of women. It has presented women in different roles, images, and responsibilities over time, however, one must question whether has it simply recorded what was going on in society, or has had a deliberate effect on how society views women, and how women, especially young, impressionable, adolescent women, view themselves. The contention of this paper is that advertising is not an unbiased reflector of women in society, but that it actively manipulates society’s understanding of what it means to be a woman, and that these manipulations are often harmful to the society that internalizes them.

Objectification theory [as explained by Frederickson & Roberts, (1997) in Murnen, Smolak, Mills & Good, 20003], posits that the ubiquitous objectification of women in our culture encourages body dissatisfaction, eating problems, and other mental health concerns among girls and women. There are data that show that women are objectified in the media, that girls and women experience a high rate of body dissatisfaction and eating problems, and that exposure to objectified media images of women is related to the experience of self-objectification and body shame among women. (Murnen, Smolak, Mills, & Good, 2003, ¶ 1)

In her curriculum guide to using Jean Kilbourne’s unprecedented expose-style 1979 documentary “Killing Us Softly” (updated and re-released in 1987 and updated in 2000 as “Beyond Killing Us Softly: The Strength to Resist”) with college students and adults, Gail Dines notes:

 Studies show that girls and women are extreemely dissatisfied with their bodies, often to the point of hating their bodies, as well as themeselves. While this is not a new phenomenon, the images of women have become more and more impossible to fulfil. Models are thinner today than they have ever been and there are fewer and fewer alternative images in the media. From movie stars to TV anchor women, women in the public eye are expected to conform to a narrow standard of beauty, which is achieved through plastic surgery, excessive dieting, exercizing and sophisticated air brushing technology.

Given that real women come in a variety of shapes and sizes and skin colors, there is a growing rift between the ideal beauty standard and reality. However, as we become a nation of image consumers, the line between media and reality blurs since we take the media to be a representative of real women. (Dines, 2000, 37)

In her 1997 article in USA Today magazine, Jan Kurtz gives a telescoped history of the female image in advertising:

·        1890s – 1910s: transition from creation to purchase, woman as decorators of the home, introduction of women’s magazines and stereotypes of female beauty and worthiness. The “look” changed from voluptuous and sensual to “giggling girl or devoted mother.”

·        1920s: Le jazz hot, household conveniences, and a switch from describing the qualities of an item to connecting ownership of that item to a more glamorous life. The “look” was about modernity and consumerism. Women won the right to vote, more began to work and attend college. Advertisers launched “America’s first war on fat. The ultra-glamorous flapper deliberately countered the suffragette’s dowdy attire and militant attitude. However, copywriters urged even the most independent female to use her newly acquired leisure time to pursue domestic skills.”

·        1930s: The Great Depression created a need for entertainment and advertisers played to their audiences need for escape.

·        1940s: Rosie the Riveter was encouraged to make dinner after work, and dress up to serve it to her husband. It was even suggested that home-front shopping could help win the war.

·        1950s: The era of the domestic goddess and an increased separation between the day-time lives of men (at work) and women (at home). “In this context, advertising idealized the domestic sphere and women as its guardian. America's nuclear family was a haven of democratic virtue against the Cold War threat.” It was the job of “the little woman” to keep her home free of dirt of all types: physical, emotional, sexual. The women created by the media to sell the disposable goods the housewife used to do that were “artifical creatures with exaggerated, off-balance and tentative poses.”

·        1960s: Advertising cashed in on the era’s infatuation with youth, liberation, and sex with “the stewardess [as] the totem women of the times. She combined a sex kitten's wardrobe, a chef's flair, a mother's nurturing, and a working gal's independence. Advertising's constant play along the erotic continuum had a harassing insistence to be sexy, stay sexy, get sexier. Housewives were marginalized further by the obsession with youth, sex, and power.”

·        1970s: “Ironically, women's lib, celebrations of ethnic heritage, critiques of capitalism, and the draw of the "natural look" all were adopted by advertising to bolster arguments for consumption. True individuality, it promised, could be found only in the mass market. Working women were few, and success and glamor remained white, while images of whom to be remained schizophrenic. … ‘The glamour gal’ [in these ads is] posed in perpetual sexual availability; the housewife was a true believer in the cult of cleanliness. Occasionally, career images seemed to offer alternative identities, but usually advertising's professional women radiated an aura of spinsterhood.” The highly-touted “natural look” was made up mainly of hairspray, makeup and other consumables.

·        1980s – 1990s: “Traditional selling formulas have been exhausted, and today's public seems prone to chronic discontent. Advertising though, has found a way to use America's cynicism, nihilism, and vanishing capacity for collective memory to intrigue the bored consumer.” While there are models of all colors and many ages, the main image of beauty in the media remains “young, white, and emaciated.” [1]

During all this time, girls have been growing into women and generation after generation have been exposed to more and more restrictive images of how they are “supposed” to look, act, dress, think, behave, be. In their research in 2000, Coltrane and Messineo relied on the work of a number of other authors when they state:

Television is the most popular medium for advertising. Over 98% of American households have at least one television set, the average household has a television turned on for over 30 hr [sic] each week, and about one fifth of every broadcast hour consists of commercials (Bretl & Cantor, 1988; Kellner, 1990, Signorelli, 1991). Consequently, it is virtually impossible to avoid television's advertising imagery (Barthel, 1988)”. (Coltrane & Messineo, 2000, Introduction ¶ 4)

And more often than not, this imagry contains women. Utilizing the work of a number of other authors, Murnen et al indicate the pervasive nature of the objectification of women in American culture:

Objectification of women and girls in our culture is pervasive (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997). In the media, women's bodies are more likely to be shown to advertise products and there is often a focus on parts of the body, rather than the whole body, which emphasizes the view of woman as an object (e.g., Archer, Iritani, Kimes, & Barrios, 1983; Kilbourne, 1994). Images of women are often sexualized, which sends the message that men may “possess” women's bodies (see Frederickson & Roberts, 1997)”. (Murnen et al, 2003 ¶2)

In her May 2002 article, Lavers quotes the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reporting that, in many families media have replaced teachers and parents as educators, role models, and the primary sources of information about the world. Children between the ages of two and 18 spend six-and-a-half to eight hours a day with media, including television, videotapes, movies and video games – more time than they spend on any other activity except sleeping. By age 18, the average young person has seen 200,000 acts of violence on television alone.

In this same article, the AAP is also quoted saying:

Of 10,000 hours of broadcast programming reviewed by the National Television Violence Study, 61 percent portrayed interpersonal violence, much of it in an entertaining or glamorized manner. The highest proportion of violence was in children's programs: Of all animated films produced in the United States between 1937 and 1999, 100 percent portrayed violence. (Lavers, 2002 ¶ 5)

And much of that televised violence was violence against women.

Kilbourne, who is also the author of “Deadly Persuasion” (re-released in 2001 as “Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel”) speaks about her books and films regularly on the college and organizational lecture circuit. At one screening, described by Clea Simon in Ms. Magazine On-Line’s December/Janauary 2000/2001 issue as typical of her approach, Kilbourne states that in the world of advertising, “our face becomes a mask, …and our body becomes a thing.”

Her voice is calm, even a little sad now that she's flashing picture after picture of women with impossibly smooth, overwhelmingly Caucasian features onto the screen. “And turning a human being into a thing,” she continues, “is often the first step toward justifying violence.” The next series of ads begins by showing women as props, intended to make cars or apartments more attractive; it then shifts to tight shots of butts and thighs, and finally mere parts. Dismembered limbs. Meat. (Simon, 2000/2001 ¶ 3)

In her article, Lavers includes information from a report created by the Los Angeles-based Parents Television Council (PTC), and interviews with a media activist, and a former FBI agent:

Television and film have increased the “raunch factor” in a study of the 2000-01 TV season titled The Sour Family Hour. The report showed “huge increases in coarse language,” up 78 percent compared with the last study in 1998-99. (It equated coarse language with “verbal violence,” seeing it as the starting point of the violence continuum.) TV violence was up a whopping 70 percent in the two years since the previous study. The sexual content fell into subcategories -- including homosexuality, oral sex, pornography, masturbation and “kinky” practices such as phone sex, group sex and bondage – “covering topics which a generation ago would seldom have seen the light of day in 10 p.m. programming, let alone 8 p.m. fare”.

While young men are the target audience, young women are most often the victims, whether in TV series,  serial-killer glorification movies, or the ubiquitous ads that are included with both. Toronto media activist Valerie Smith indicates in her Media Violence 101 primer that, "the most extreme form of film violence, the splatter or slasher genre, was launched in 1963." This form of entertainment focuses on “teen-age girls and young women being tortured, dismembered, disemboweled, and beheaded with various construction tools: chain saws, tool guns, drills, jigsaws. The violence almost always takes place while the victims are naked or wearing skimpy lingerie.

Former FBI agent Robert Ressler and forensic psychiatrist Park Elliot Dietz, both experts on serial murder, believe these films have helped fuel the increase in serial killings because of the explicit linking of sex with torture and murder in films targeted at teen-age audiences. "If a mad scientist wanted to find a way to raise a generation of sexual sadists in America, he could hardly do better at our present state of knowledge than to try to expose a generation of teen-age boys to films showing women mutilated in the midst of a sexy scene," says Dietz. (Lavers, 2002 ¶ 13-14)

While this paper is not designed to focus on pornography, it is difficult to address media images of women without at least considering pornography briefly. In her curriculum guides, Dines opines that the position taken by Kilbourne in her documentary is that “pornography is a threat to women’s dignity and their right to be safe in their homes, workplaces and communities. From this framework, pornography is seen as a propaganda tool used by patriarchy to legitimize, condone and celebrate violence against women.” (Dines, 2002 p 40) She argues that while not making the assertion that pornography directly causes individual men to rape women, it “produces and sustains notions of femininity and masculinity that perpetuate violence against women”. (Dines, 2002 p 40)

Many of the conventions and codes used in pornography, such as the “come get me” or “come hither” look, bondage, and images of women enjoying being raped are repackaged for the conventional, mainstream media, entering the collective unconscious and affecting the way young men and women view the female body.

Several advertising campaigns have done precisely that, always just to the precise degree permitted by the mainstream society at the time – a limit that continues to escalate year after year. In her 1997 article Kurz listed a few of what she considers the most notable of these campaigns:

From 1941 to 1964, Rheingold beer staged elaborate, nationwide contests in which tavern-goers cast their beer label vote for the new Miss Rheingold. Only the presidential election drew more participants than these annual events.

Maidenform's memorable Dream campaign ("I dreamed I was a ____ in my Maidenform bra") debuted in 1949 and ran for the next 20 years. After maintaining the World War II homefront, many women returned to traditional roles of housewife and mother. While numerous ads at the time portrayed women in domestic settings, the Dream ads' elaborate fantasy situations fed women's hunger for romance, independence, and personal achievement. Dream ads were re-created in store windows, parodied on TV, and spoofed in magazines and greeting cards.

In 1955, Life magazine found Clairol's "Does She or Doesn't She?" hair coloring campaign too sexually suggestive to run. When a poll of female employees turned up no awareness of a double entendre, the magazine changed its stance.

Virginia Slims, "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" campaign began in 1967 as women's lib was grabbing America's attention. Virginia Slims quickly became the leading women's cigarette”.[2]

Over the past two decades we have seen enormous, larger than life-sized images of men and women barely wearing Calvin Klein’s underwear appear and hover over Times Square, and the increasingly bizarre and pornographic ads for his perfumes in magazines and on television. Victoria’s Secret’s lingere ads portray women as sex goddesses and angels, and their runway shows are filmed and shown on the Internet as soft-core pornography that “good” men and boys can feel clean and wholesome about watching because it’s entirely mainstream and acceptable; after all, “it’s just an ad.” The entire concept of “heroin chic” exemplifies all the issues raised in this paper, portraying young girls as nearly naked, emaciated, addicted (usually to a man), victimized – and loving it.

On a more subtle, less graphic level, Simon spent time “leaf[ing] through a fat issue of Vogue [with Kilbourne], paying particular attention to the ads, and talk[ing] about advertising and addictions. We c[a]me across an ad proclaiming ‘Strength isn't always a shout.’ The woman in the picture is beautifully made up, but her mouth is closed. ‘That's the message women get all the time,’ [said Kilbourne] ‘you know, be strong but don't speak up too much, don't be too loud. Don't.’”

A number of researchers support Murnen et al, when they say:

Objectification is likely one factor among the "lived experiences" of being female that contributes to the gendered pattern found in the eating disorders of anorexia and bulimia. Smolak and Murnen (2001) argued that the gendered experiences of the "culture of thinness" promoted for girls, a greater experience of sexual harassment and sexual abuse which might contribute to body shame and loss of voice (see Smolak & Murnen, 2001, 2002; Smolak & Munstertieger, 2002), and limitations on women's achievement that focus girls on a good body as the key to success present a particular risk of body image and eating problems among girls and women. Objectification is part of this cultural constellation of factors. (Murnen et al, 2003, Discussion section, ¶ 8)

Coltrane and Messineo’s research project focused on “the intersection of race and gender by examining which characters in mid-1990s television commercials exercised authority or fulfilled romantic and domestic fantasies [in order to] document how advertising and mass marketing might perpetuate newer, more subtle forms of prejudice against women and people of color.” Their results caused them to posit that characters in commercials and television shows are accorded more respect and command more authority if they are white and male. The stretch to include movies in this indictment does not seem unfounded.

Studies of both [TV] programs and commercials show that men characters are likely to be more developed and complex than their female counterparts, outnumbering them by two or three to one, with male voices narrating almost 10 times more frequently than female ones. In general, women characters have been more likely to be shown in the home, with men more likely to be shown outside or in occupational roles. Research consistently documents how television commercials present conventional gender stereotypes, with women shown as young, thin, sexy, smiling, acquiescent, provocative, and available. Men characters, in contrast, tend to be shown as knowledgeable, independent, powerful, successful, and tough. (Coltrane & Messenio, 2000, Male portrayals of race and gender section, ¶ 3)

In addition to being portrayed as sex objects and willing participants in their own victimization, degredation, even torture, the women we encounter in the media are unrealistically thin. According to Murnen et al, Playboy centerfold models, Miss America contestants, female television characters, and models in women's magazines have all gotten thinner over the decaces, whereas the average American women has become heavier. After reviewing their own research and the work of a number of others, Murnen et al conclude that:

Discrepancies between women's actual body size and the ideal body size presented in the media are likely to occur and can lead to body dissatisfaction. Body dissatisfaction is so common among women as to be described as "normative" (Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegel-Moore, 1985). Children as young as 6 years have been found to express body dissatisfaction and concerns about their weight (Flannery-Schroeder & Chrisler, 1996; Smolak & Levine, 1994).

This experience of body dissatisfaction is linked to the existence of objectified images of women, according to much research. Groesz, Levine, and Murnen (2002) conducted a meta-analysis of the experimental research that related exposure to thin images and body dissatisfaction; they found that, across 43 samples, those groups of girls and women exposed to thin images of women expressed more body dissatisfaction than did control groups. A similar effect, although smaller, was found in the correlational research (Groesz, Murnen, & Levine, 2001). Such studies suggest that the media do have an effect on viewers, although in the analysis of the experimental literature the effect was stronger among those who were more vulnerable, such as those with a diagnosed eating disorder. (Murnen et al, 2003 ¶ 4-5)

Simon quotes Killbourne, who often lectures in front of a huge blow-up picture of an ad depicting a perfect, air-brushed model, saying, “We are surrounded by such images of ideal beauty, that we are all being judged against this porcelain perfection. And that when we are compared to such a standard, ‘failure is inevitable’”. (Simon 2000/2001, ¶ 1)

Anecdotal and experimental evidence indicate that “during late childhood and early adolescence social comparison plays a significant role in self-perception and that girls whose body shapes are further from ideal report greater dissatisfaction with their bodies.” (Levine & Smolak, 1998; Smolak & Levine, 2001 as cited in Murnen et al, 2003, ¶ 4)

While some girls and young women are going to be more vulnerable to media messages than others based on their individual personalities, backgrounds, genetic make-up, and other unique factors, all are subject to the same relentless images of the ideal created by the society in which they live. “Cultural images that objectify women are noticeable, and girls' responses to such images suggest that girls develop a pattern of response. Those girls who reject the images manifest higher body esteem and seem less vulnerable generally to the cultural ideal of thin, sexy women.” (Murnen et al, 2003, Discussion section, ¶ 8)

"Advertising is cumulative, and it's mostly unconscious,” says Kilbourne. Even when we do not buy a product, she insists, at some level we buy into the consumer mind-set, and that makes us vulnerable to the $200 billion-a-year ad industry. We are the biggest consumer society on the face of the earth, and advertisers often apply tremendous pressure to the media to adapt content. “I'm not saying that people are brainwashed,” says Kilbourne. “I'm not saying that advertisers have absolute control or anything like that. I'm just saying it is a powerful influence and we need to take it seriously. It's a powerful influence that's increasing in the culture.” (Simon, 2000/2001, ¶ 6)

Murnen et al, agree, and they have support from a number of other authors for their position on the effects of the pressure placed on girls and young women by the culture’s idea that women’s bodies are “things” or “projects” or other types of objects.

For girls, cultural messages about achievement are often narrowly and sharply focused on their bodies; the culture promotes the idea that girls' bodies are ‘projects’ to work on (e.g., Brumberg, 1997). Girls get messages about thinness from multiple sources (Smolak & Levine, 2001), and it has been suggested that some girls live in a ‘culture of dieting’ in which peers, parents, and media promote anti-fat messages (Levine, Smolak, & Hayden, 1994). High school girls engage in ‘fat talk’ (i.e., disparaging remarks about their own and others' weight) in order to be accepted (Nichter, 2000). Girls are taught to view their bodies as ‘projects’ that need work before they can attract others, whereas boys are likely to learn to view their bodies as tools to use to master the environment (Stephens, Hill, & Hanson, 1994). Further, the feminine gender role discourages autonomy or ‘voice’ in girls that might otherwise encourage girls to pay attention to cultural values about the body (Smolak & Munstertieger, 2002; Tolman & Porche, 2000). [This in turn] encourages encourages girls to see the appearance of their bodies as a form of achievement. (Murnen et al, 2003, Discussion section, ¶ 8)

In conducting their study, Murnen et al showed photos of men and women to boys and girls in order to elicit their responses to the “perfect” people posed before them. They indicated that they were “surprised” to find that:

Boys were more likely than girls to say that nonsuperficial changes would need to be made to conform to the ideal” and attributed that in part to the fact that the pictures of the women focused on their slimness and their skimpy wardrobes, while the photos of the men showed bare, muscular torsos – a more physical and permanent attribute. It was interesting to note that “even though boys were likely to know that non-superficial change would be needed to look like the muscular men, they seemed to know that this was not reasonable. For example, one boy said one would need to “work out five hours a day!”, to look like these men; another said one would have to “pick up half the school!” In contrast, among the girls who indicated that non-superficial changes would be necessary to attain the ideal, the same incredulity was not apparent in their responses. One girl said with little emotion that to look like them one would have to “either eat and throw up the food or don't eat at all,” and another said, in a matter-of-fact way, “get plastic surgery.” These girls seemed resigned to the idea that some very serious changes might be expected of them to attain cultural ideals. This is consistent with the idea that women's bodies are “projects” to work on in a culture where internalization of cultural objectification is encouraged (Brumberg, 1997; Martin & Kennedy, 1993). (Murnen et al, 2003, Discussion section, ¶ 7)

“And then there's food-advertising that encourages women to substitute eating for love,” Kilbourne maintains, [in Simon’s article] even while showing us images of impossibly thin women. “You eat partly to numb the pain you feel because you're in a miserable relationship,” she says, pointing to a chocolate ad in which a woman appears to float into a romantic fantasy with just one bite. “But it also becomes the substitute for a relationship. There's tremendous cynicism in the culture about relationships”. (Simon, 2000/2001, ¶ 6)

Other research, including that of Coltrane and Messineo, seems to bear this out.

Besides being shown individuals with flawless faces and perfect bodies, television consumers are increasingly allowed surreptitiously to observe countless interpersonal experiences that have a fantastic or ‘magical’ quality (Jhally, 1989, Williams, 1993; Williamson, 1978). Examples of these carefully crafted moments, or ‘mythologies’ (Barthes, 1957/1973), include ‘the good old days,’ ‘the happy family,’ ‘fun-loving youth,’ and the ubiquitous romantic encounter (Tolson, 1996; p. 7). In the typical advertising image of romance -- purposely fuzzy around the edges -- beautiful people effortlessly fall in love and fulfill their deepest romantic longings”. (Coltrane & Messinio, 2000, Media framing, commercial realism, and the cultural production of selves section, ¶ 3)

This vicarious enjoyment of the perfect life, in which everyone is thin, beautiful, glamorous, and happy in love, seduces viewers into ignoring the accompanying sales pitch, at least at the most conscious level, and buy into their underlying racist, sexist, classist, and “thin-ist” messages.

As outlined at the beginning of this paper, images of women in the media remain somewhat plastic, altering whenever the need to create a market  or manipulate society’s understanding of what it means to be a woman require it, yet returning time and time again to the same basic perfectionist parameters. Kurtz (1997) lays it out quite clearly:

The Superwoman is a multi-faceted success machine. She nurtures, seduces, and competes without pause. For her, age, gender, childbearing, and finite hours in a day are the excuses of lesser mortals for not reaching self-actualization. This "24-hour woman" emerged in the 1920s as the flapper. The woman who "has it all" reached her heyday in the 1980s, before suffering a backlash from an exhausted target market.

The independent Woman first appeared at the turn of the century, but showed up only sporadically through the next seven decades before becoming a dominant image in the 1990s. Although many advertisers have seemed unsure how independent they want their female market to be, other marketers have played an important social role by challenging stereotypes of females.

The Love Tutor cajoles, scolds, befriends, and seduces women to compete in the love market. Maternal figures, "failed" women, sex kittens, potential lovers, and successful celebrities take turns guiding the flock.

The Sex Kitten transfers eroticism to the product. She long has been used to catch women's eyes as well as men's. Studies have shown that women respond more strongly than men to a sexualized image of another woman. In 1936, Woodbury's soap unveiled the first fully nude female in a national advertising campaign.

The Homemaker is queen of the domestic sphere. She often reigns during reactionary times when home seems a haven in a heart-less world. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, she symbolized tradition. In the 1950s, she formed the centerpiece of Cold War cultural solidarity. She almost has disappeared in today's celebration of career women.

In order to outline the ways in which all or most of the factors discussed in this paper can come together in a single advertisment, two ads and their descriptions have been added to this text. See Figures 1 (page 19) and 2 (page 20). They were adapted by Simon from Kilbourne’s book “Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think”.

The initial hypothesis of this paper, that power of the media to influence and even to control the self-images and cultural standards of our society is greater than most individual consumers would like to believe. However, like it or not, the theory that advertising is not an unbiased reflector of women in society, but an active manipulator of mainstream society’s basic concept of what it means to be a woman, and that these manipulations are often harmful to the society that internalizes them, has been borne out in this paper by numerous researchers, authors and authorities.

Figure 1. Glamorizing Violence:

Ad after ad implies that girls and women don't really mean “no” when they say it, that women are only teasing when they resist men's advances. This perfume ad, designed specifically to run in teen magazines, features a very young woman, with eyes blackened by makeup – or perhaps something else, and the copy, “Apply generously to your neck so he can smell the scent as you shake your head ‘no’.” In other words, wear this and he'll understand that you don't really mean “no” when you say it, and he can ignore your protests and respond to the scent like any other animal.

Figure 2. “Selling Sex:

This ad may say “you have the right to remain sexy,” however, the subtext is clearly “but only if you look like this.” The woman in this ad is an object—available, exposed, essentially passive. She has been “given” the right to remain sexy, but not the right to be actively sexual. This is a pseudo-sexuality that makes it more difficult for women to discover their own unique and authentic sexuality. How sexy can a woman really be if she hates her body? How fully can she surrender to passion if she is worried that her thighs are too heavy or her stomach too fat, if she can't bear to be seen in the light, or if she doesn't like the fragrance of her own genitals?”

Bibilography

Coltrane, Scott, & Messineo, Melinda. (2000, March). The Perpetuation of Subtle Prejudice: Race and Gender Imagery in 1990s Television Advertising. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. 42, (363-389) 

Joireman, Sandra, & Colbert, P. J. (1997). Gender in Advertising: sample ads by type. Marshalltown Community College.  http://www.iavalley.cc.ia.us/~pcolbert/gender/genderr.htm. (Accessed 10-4-04).

Kilbourne, Jean. (1994). Still killing us softly: Advertising and the obsession with thinness. In Fallon, P., Katzman, M. A., & Wooley, S. C. (Eds.) , Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders (pp. 395- 418). New York: The Guilford Press.

 Kurtz, Jan. (1997, January). Dream girls: women in advertising - advertising history.
USA Today Magazine.

Lavers, Daphne. (2002, May 13). The verdict on media violence: it's ugly … and getting uglier: sex and violence, designed to sell soap, soft drinks and cars, seems to sell itself far better than the products, and the audience for this tawdry message is our children. Insight on the News.

Limpinnian, Danielle. (2002, April). The Portrayal of Men and Women in TV Ads. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Sections/advert04.html. (Accessed 10-5-04).

Merskin, Debra. (1999, June). Adolescence, advertising, and the ideology of menstruation - critical essay - statistical data included. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. 40, (941-957)

Murnen, Sarah, Smolak, Linda, Mills, J. Andrew, Good, Lindsey. (2003, November). Thin, sexy women and strong, muscular men: grade-school children's responses to objectified images of women and men. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. 49, (427-437)

Paxton, S. J., Wertheim, E. H., Gibbons, K., Szmukler, G. I., et al. (1991). Body image satisfaction, dieting beliefs, and weight loss behaviors in adolescent girls and boys. Journal of Youth & Adolescence, 20 (3), 361-370.

Powers, P. D., & Erickson, M. T. (1986). Body-image in women and its relationship to self-image and body satisfaction. The Journal of Obesity and Weight Regulation. 5 (1), 37-49. 

Richins, M. L. (1991). Social comparison and the idealized images of advertising. Journal of Consumer Research. 18, 71-83.

Silverstein, B., Perdue, L., Peterson, B., Kelly, E. (1986).The role of the mass media in promoting a thin standard of bodily attractiveness for women. Sex Roles. 14 (9/10), 519-532.

Simon, Clea. (2000-2001, December/January). Hooked. Ms. Magazine On-Line. http://www.msmagazine.com/jan01/hooked_jan01.html. (Accessed 10-4-04).

Stice, E., & Shaw, H. E. (1994). Adverse effects of the media portrayed thin-ideal on women and linkages to bulimic symptomatology. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. 13 (3), 288-308.

Tiggeman, M., & Pickering, A. S. (1996). Role of television in adolescent women's body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness. International Journal of Eating Disorders. 20 (2), 199-203.

 

 

 


[1] All material in this telescoped history is quoted or paraphrased from Kurtz, Jan. (1997, January). Dream girls: women in advertising - advertising history. USA Today Magazine.

 

[2] All ad references in this list are quoted or paraphrased from Kurtz, Jan. (1997, January). Dream girls: women in advertising - advertising history. USA Today Magazine.