"Finger touches her lips and she becomes silent"
"Compete with other girls for the attention of boys"
Due to the fact that teenaged girls are in the process of finding their own identities, they are extremely vulnerable and gullible to consumerism. Advertisers prey on young girls’ low self-esteem and provide many ideas of what real women consist of, by using sexual images of women to sell their products, which will supposedly make them more attractive and boost their confidence. However, young girls often fall into the hidden traps that television commercials and teen magazines set especially for them. The commercials tell them to purchase bodily products for unattainable beauty. Also, they are encouraged by these images to remain silent and allow their bodies to serve as voices.
Advertisers use sexual images of women to sell their beauty products. Wolf compares sexualized women to slaves: “An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that ‘justify’ the institution of slavery”. (Wolf 124) She is clearly saying that if the economy seems to function progressively due to the expense of a group of innocent people, then it will try to distribute justifications through images and rally up those in favor of the system so that it does not change, but perpetuate. In women’s case, advertisements are somewhat degrading and offensive to them, but they are very popular and often advertised. Thus, like slaves, women are tightly chained to the shackles of this unattainable beauty ideal that advertisers have locked them in.
As girls grow up, advertisers teach them that they should stay quiet and gradually lower their self-esteems. In like manner to slaves, Kilbourne describes the socially- constructed behavior of women, “Girls…are encouraged to be silent.” (Kilbourne 264) She is implying that within these bodily product commercials, they are persuading girls to remain silent and let their bodies speak for themselves. In other words, instead of men actually listening to a woman’s verbal conversation, they should pay more attention to her body language. Therefore, similar to slaves, the mentality of young women would prove to be unthreatening to the dominate men.
Work Cited
Kilbourne, Jean. “The More You Subtract, The More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size.”
Gender, Race, and Class in Media. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2003. 258-267
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth.” Female Beauty. (1991): 120-125
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