FOREWORD

ALICEA FITZPATRICK     IBRAHIM AL-SAUD     CLAUDIA GOMEZ

Our group chose the topic of controlling images of women in advertising and the objectification of women’s bodies. There have been many conversations regarding this subject of sexism in the media and throughout advertising. Our website provides 70 sources and examples of the problems of inappropriately portraying women’s bodies in advertisements.

Companies often use women in demeaning ways to sell their products and services. By dressing women up to look young, to using airbrush and photoshop, to posing them in uncomfortable and sexual positions; these are just a few of the many ways the media portrays a bad standard of women’s beauty. One very controversial topic is the idea of needing to be so skinny to look like models in advertisements, that many women now have eating disorders in order to achieve an unrealistic look. This topic is also another example of how men and women are treated differently. In advertisements, men are always posed in powerful positions that exude confidence and women are put in overly sexualized and demeaning positions.

The controlling images of women surely has many adverse effects on all types of people. From creating an unrealistic beauty standard for women and young girls, to creating false ideas to boys and men too that a woman is only beautiful if she looks like the models seen in advertisements. Being young adults, we are becoming more aware of these issues of sexism in the media and want to address the problems we are seeing. We need a wider range of people in advertisements that better represent the average woman, not the look of one that people must cosmetically alter and starve themselves to achieve.

Our goal is to both inform and make a change. We first want to highlight the issues we are finding in advertisements today, and then go about ways that we can help solve them. In our final project, our group uses many examples of inappropriate and sexist advertisements and highlight the problems with them. From oversexualizing, to photoshop, to promoting rape culture, these ads are very detrimental to all different types of people who view them on a regular basis, because they are everywhere in our culture and society today.

We are developing this project for advertisers and also for consumers, especially young women. Many girls develop the idea of what ideal beauty is at a very young age, and much of this influence comes from what they see in advertisements. We also hope that advertisers and companies will understand the impact of their decisions and only make positive, appropriate advertisements in the future.

            When looking through our website, as a viewer you should be able to relate. I bet that throughout everyone’s lives they have seen at least one example of the negative portrayal of women throughout advertising. We have 7 separate themes within advertising with at least 10 examples in each. As you go through, think about how often you see ads like them and the types of feelings they invoke. Hopefully, after seeing the problems with advertisements and they way they portray women, in the future you will think differently of a company who decided to promote their products by demeaning and oversexualizing women.