Representations of Women in the Media

In watching “Miss Representation” we learned about all the subversive ways advertisers spend huge amounts of money on advertisements. This tends to create the mythology of the “perfect woman.”

In the video above from As/Is on Youtube, it is shown how ridiculous these ads portray women just to get people to buy their products. These ads were shown during the SuperBowl, which is primarily watched by men. The advertisements sexualize women in ways that sometimes don't regard their products. At the end of the video the women talk about how in the advertisements woman have the certain "body" that companies use to market their products.

As Bardo asks in her article “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, “When did “perfection” become applicable to a human body? The word suggests a Platonic form of timeless beauty—appropriate for marble, perhaps, but not for living flesh.”

For this assignment find an advertisement  with obvious sexual or unrealistic displays of women as the leading motif: Is it obvious what product or service is being sold? How would you utilize the rhetorical strategies we have learned about to change this ad and make it less exploitive to women’s bodies?