Sexualization Of Women

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When being presented with this essay, I immediately knew that I wanted to discuss how women are represented their advertisements. When searching through many potential ad candidates, this ad stood out to me the most. Women in the media are often over sexualized and ads often depicting women to be more adolescent than their true age, which can lead to negative effects in our society and viewers of media.
In the image spread above, there are two women who appear to be very young and advertising summer time apparel. The woman to the left has very small features like her small breasts, undefined waist, thin thighs, and the bones on her back are very noticeable. This model was chosen due to her very juvenile features, these juvenile features are …show more content…
I find her images to be most troubling because she is being placed under the “School’s out” typography and resembles a schoolgirl persona much more than the model on the left of the image. Her facial expression is very seductive and she is being photographed on a bed, the photograph looks very intimate and stimulates a Polaroid quality image. I believe that the photographer produced this image with young, female shoppers in mind. In today’s trends, a vintage vibe is extremely popular and we also see that girls want to be sexualized at an earlier age. You could present this image and to a young girl and she could think that it’s an “aesthetic” or that it’s highlighting “feminine beauty,” these being common words used to describe sexual exploitation in the name of art. The young woman has her skirt slightly hiked up in the back as if she is trying to be flirty, maybe even teasing her audience. When an image portrays a woman as being a tease, this can be a very dangerous path for an ad to embark on because it might be giving off subtle hints of domestic violence. When reviewing ads that possessed very violent messages, the women in the ads were very submissive, flirty or appearing to be teasing the audience, or their facial expressions gave another meaning to the …show more content…
Though I already addressed this aspect of the ad partially, I would like to elaborate on this more. Like I stated before, the images have an “old school” feeling. The backdrops of the images are crisp, white settings that mirror a bedroom. I believe that this is significant detail to how sexualized the ad is because obviously a bedroom has one specific meaning and taking pictures in that type of setting goes beyond privacy, has sexual undertones, and the image on the right again gives a juvenile effect with the posters being on the wall. American Apparel has always been the brand for the “cool kid” and is constantly illustrated in the ads by the use of aesthetically pleasing colors, simplicity, and basic apparel that is very plain in order to focus on the wearer rather than the
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