I think both women and men can be presented in a bad light in advertising, however, I disagree with this statement, as advertising in the recent past has arguably presented women in a much worse light. For example, one may argue that women are negatively targeted in advertising from a very young age, with magazines aimed at teenage girls often using Photoshop to adapt their content and putting pressure on their young readers to fit the image of perfection that they present as real. This ingrains an unhealthy attitude into today’s youth that will likely only grow as they get older and are exposed to a larger and more explicit barrage of this type of content, as well as normalizing sexualized image of young children to an almost dangerous extent in a time where sexual abuse and harassment of youth is already a large problem. Even when women get older there is immense pressure to stay looking young and perfect or become an unattractive old maid in the eyes of the media.
Men and women are presented and targeted vastly differently in advertising, with men often shown as powerful, successful and wealthy where women are shown as submissive and seductive sex objects. In more recent times, men have become more sexualized and objectified in advertising and the media than in the past, creating insecurities about the perfect body and the need to be unemotional and not discuss mental health issues or how they are feeling – or else be considered less of a man.
In the media, the psychoanalytic theory of Madonna-whore complex is a reasonably common issue. Sigmund Freud noted that some men couldn’t be sexually aroused by their wives as they viewed them with too much respect, whereas they viewed ‘whores’ and mistresses as solely sexual objects undeserving of this respect. This portrayal of promiscuous women as people who don’t deserve respect or acknowledgement as humans or anything other than a ‘whore’ is often reinforced by advertising in the media, for example women may be presented as a hard-working in the home, motherly ‘Madonna’ in an advertisement for detergent or a sexualized and seductive ‘whore’ in an advertisement for food. The Madonna is often a passive, maternal woman where the ‘Whore’ is a desirable, ‘slutty’ woman. The reinforcement of this complex is bad for society as it enforces the idea that women can only fit into these two categories, and that there are no other options except these two roles that women can fill in the world. This also represents sexuality as a bad thing that makes women ‘dirty’, when in reality there is nothing wrong with a woman showing sexuality freely alongside having a motherly aspect of their personality.
In the past women were often presented as the perfect doting housewives, but this has since changed and split into these two possibilities of the Whore or the Madonna, which could be seen by some as a worse image of femininity in an age where the media is everywhere and younger and younger girls can access social media, which creates a situation where images are edited constantly and put out without making it clear that the image isn’t a real representation of what a person should aspire to look like. The current social climate breeds self-esteem issues in youth that will only continue into their adulthood. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter who is presented in a better or a worse light because the media can often have a bad effect on anyone who takes it in. A man seeing a woman in an objectified light in advertising may begin to think that women are supposed to be sexualised and objectified in life, and a woman seeing I would likely feel degraded and possibly try to fit the role it seems that she should be taking in society. This ultimately leads to unhealthy ideals and views on the world in everyone involved, so no one really ends up better off with this type of advertising.
Jennifer Higgins - Media Studies 