The depiction of women in products advertising Essay

Therefore most roles given to women must have a little bit of sexual content attached to them. The worst thing is that the mass media is not restricted in making sexuality of women explicit. It is almost similar to the situation of exploitation of women for entertaining or money making agendas.
When women are used in advertising products, they become the main source of sexual scrutiny (Deckard, 1975 380) even when the product is not related with any form of sexuality whatsoever. Due to this situation women become the major targets to which messages are conveyed by industries (Faulder, 1977 37). Although in North America, women have equal proportions of visibility as men in terms of advertisements, there is still an element of enslavery involved in the content which women are used (Courtney and Lockeretz, 1974).
The categories in which women are portrayed in North America include an employed woman, a housewife and a sex object. The latter has the largest category (NARB, 1975). The first category which is recognizing the woman's image as an employed person has increased over time. Now more women have been recruited into the labour force of North America since 1947 (Fems, 1971). In advertisements or TV commercials women normally played domestic roles while men played occupational roles (Cantor, 1975). The second category in which women were portrayed in North America was the image of housewives. Feminists have criticized issues of hardwork and sexual roles handed over to women but the worst thing is that this does not go on only in real life. It is also portrayed to the virtual world through the media (NARB, 1975). The burden of housework is mostly considered as the full responsibility of the woman. At the same time, women are criticized because men think women consume much time performing these responsibilities. In 1974 a study by Calley and Bennet showed that women were only portrayed as either housewives or mothers in most advertisements. The content of housewife advertisements even goes to the extent of portraying women as stupid, incapable of performing simple tasks and extremely dependent on their male counterparts even if they are note married (Courtney and Lockeretz, 1970).
Women are aware of the sexual appreciation they receive when they expose their bodies but the point is they are resentful when it comes to using their bodies to demonstrate to the public through advertising. The resentfulness has a reason and this reason makes perfect sense because apart from making money, there is nothing positive about exposing one's body (from the view of the female). The actually feel that it diminished their self-esteem and also focuses on only their bodies while ignoring other potentials that are related to their reasoning. If the effect was only on women, it would have still been fair but in a subliminal way, children also feel the effect as well especially the adolescents. They would tend to grown up with corrupt values and if not correctly check, the might stick to that for