What are ads trying to say about the world we live in?

We see ads every day in our lives, either through TV, billboards, magazines, clothes, and the list goes on. In the past, there has been a major separation between women in ads and men being in them. Is this an effect from our society and how we treat the other sex? Maybe we are so used to it, that we try to avoid it all together. Do the ads we see every day have an effect on us and how we live? To a degree we can say yes.

Most of the ads we see are with the ideal people we want to be. The women are young, fit, great eyes, beautiful glowing hair, and etc. The men are young, very well fit, six pack abs with every guy, and etc. As we see, these people are the standards for what our society is. When I watched two videos on advertising with Sut Jhaly on The Codes on Gender and Jean Kilbourne on Killing Us Softly 4, I found myself more informed about how advertising is really portrayed.

The first thing that has to be noticed is that sex and gender are two different things. Sex deals with biological differences, while gender deals with cultural and physical differences. As Erving Goffman's explains in his book about gender, that there are really two different sides, masculinity and femininity. With these two sides of masculinity and femininity, these two determines who is male and female in the cultural aspect. It is expected that we know our roles as men and women, this is known as gender display. The men are strong, confident, not shy, attackers, while the women are emotional, sensitive, sexual (innocent though) and fragile. These few examples determines who is masculine and feminine in the culture.

With Jean Kilbourne's video, I felt that it wasn't about how we are portrayed in the ads, but how we look. The women in the examples she showed were very skinny, and for me some were too skinny like to the bone almost. I understand if women and men want to stay in shape, but I feel there is a limitation to that. When you are under the weight your body should be, then there is a problem. I feel that sometimes we as a society judge ourselves to harshly. "If you're not skinny, then you're not beautiful." I find this a load of garbage in my opinion. Everybody will have their own unique features on their bodies, that makes us different. For me, I could care less what ads want me to be. I'm not going to be like, "oh look this guy has a beautiful girl in his arms, I need to look like him." No, I don't. One reason is that in the video Killing Us Softly 4, Kilbourne showed that ads are usually photo shop to get the ideal person. When I saw that, now I really don't care about the ads, because they're fake. Ads will still have an effect on people, sometimes good or bad.

Axe Body Wash

The ad of the woman who is dirty and the sign wash me on her stomach is an example of what our society is. This is an ad for Axe body wash. I see examples from both videos, that supports their concepts. With Kilbourne, she states that many times the ads will show parts of a woman's body. Here we can see the head is not in the ad, just the body. Jhaly states that many times the woman is not in a vertical position, always twisted. Here we see the woman is bending her body at the hip, the knee is bent, the arms are twisted as well. In this ad, even though we can't see her face we probably can still say that she is young, fit, and beautiful most likely.

Ralph Lauren

I chose another ad because I thought it was a little different, but still similar though. This ad shows a woman's body but we do see a part of her face. The ad is for Ralph Lauren polo t-shirts. The woman has a little more power with her hands in the pockets. This is different, we usually see this with men in ads. Her body is twisted like the previous ad is, so that's why I said it was similar. Again even though we can't see her face fully, we can assume that she is young, fit and etc.

The ads we see now are slowly breaking away from the norm, but not by much. Ads are going to be an influential force in our lives, until we do something to change it then it will only continue its same course. When we look at ads do we see people who we want to be, or do we realize that they don't really look like that in real life? Just in the ads.....