Images of Woman’s Sexuality in Advertisements Essay

Considering the time an average American spends in front of the TV screen, it is obvious that the things he/she sees there influence greatly his/her perception of the world around. The stereotypes media offers us make a great impact of our perception of people. Thus, it’s no wonder that the images of women’s sexuality in advertisements partly form our gender stereotypes. For to get more information on this issue, I analyzed an article by Christina N. Baker, published in the Sex Roles: A Journal of Research in January 2005. The name of the article is Images of women’s sexuality in advertisements: a content analysis of Black- and White-oriented women’s and men’s magazines. This article analyzes the stereotypes of women’s sexuality given in advertisements, the differences of those stereotypes for the White and Black woman. It gives the peculiarities of images created for the representatives of different races, and analyzes the origins and the influence of stereotypes that appear due to the TV and magazine commercials. It has always seemed to me that people in our society share some distorted view of woman and their sexuality. They express the concepts about it that are sometimes totally ridiculous (like that a woman should not express her sexual desires, as it is socially disapproved). Those concepts are very widespread nowadays, and I have been interested for a long time already why people trust those stereotypes, why lots man judge the woman that surround them on the strength of those concepts. Later I understood that the media also have the considerable role on forming the gender stereotypes. Thus I felt I wanted to know more about the specific features of these stereotypes, and, about the mechanism of their functioning. The author developed three hypotheses about the portrayal of woman in media. The first was that â€Å"sexual women will be portrayed with characteristics such as submissiveness and dependency in both women’s and men’s mainstream/White-oriented magazines†. According to the review of literature the author made, we live in a patriarchal society, where man a considered to be superior to women, thus they put the criteria of sexuality for woman. For man â€Å"†¦sexual attractiveness in women is associated with physical beauty. A sign of status for a man is to have a physically attractive woman by his side. The more physically attractive a woman is, the more prestige she will bring to her male partner/spouse†. The woman portrayed in commercials, and on the pages of the magazines is bound to be submissive, as it is one of the demands of patriarchal society. The author also notes that some of the scientific findings hypothesize that the continuous showing in the media of women as submissive sex objects whose main goal is to satisfy man’s desires, reinforces the gender hierarchy existing in the contemporary society. The second hypothesis is that â€Å"sexual Black women are more likely than sexual White women to be portrayed as dominant and independent†. The author noted that despite of the fact that all of the women are more likely to be portrayed as the sexual objects, White woman are seen as the etalon of beauty, thus they are portrayed as the sex objects more frequently than the Black women are. It is also the fact that Black women have always been depicted as dominant towards Black man. It is historically that Black man can’t get a decent job, thus Black women often have to bring the bacon home. This is the reason why Black woman are often portrayed as the heads of the families in the advertisements. The author also noted that the two stereotypes that exist about black woman are â€Å"Mommy† – the matriarch of the big family, and the mother that is raising her child by herself. The stereotype also exists in the contemporary society that Black woman usually don’t have a husband. The author adds that the Black matriarch is that is portrayed as deviant because she challenges the assumption of the patriarchal family. The third hypothesis is that â€Å"Black-oriented magazines are more likely than White-oriented magazines to portray sexual women as dominant and independent†. The literature review conducted by the author states that despite of the fact that television commercials that targeted Black audiences contained about as many stereotypical images of Blacks as did those directed toward Whites, the Blackoriented magazines portrayed women in more active and even aggressive role. It was also that in the magazines for the Blacks women were more often portrayed in the role of the mother than women in the magazines for the whites. The characteristic feature of the portrayal of woman in the Blackoriented magazines was that there woman were rather shown in an extended families than in nuclear one, † which conforms to the matriarch stereotype. † The last hypotheses said that â€Å"black women will be portrayed with physical characteristics that conform to White standards of beauty. However, Black women are more likely to have European features in White-oriented magazines than in Black-oriented magazines†. The research showed that nowadays Blackoriented magazines portray women which conform to the White standart of beauty. The color of skin of those woman is dark, but the features are thin, they are slender, and they usually have long and straight hair. In fact, the only phenotypic difference between Caucasian and Afro-American models is the color of skin. Blackoriented magazines don’t consider the fact that the features portrayed are not typical for the Black woman, and don’t respond to the African canons of beauty. The sexual attractiveness in our society is associated with Whiteness, thus the magazines try to fulfill the desires of their readers. The findings of the article’s author coincide with the results of researches conducted by the psychologists, sociologists and psychologists during the last fifty years. For example, Poe, (1976), and Silverstein & Silverstein,(1974) found that in most of the TV advertisements woman were less physically active that man were, and they were the recipients of the advice given by man. It confirms the first hypothesis of the article’s author, the one which says that women are depicted as submissive to man. The persuasion is that the woman has to be weak for to be attractive.