Pop Culture...

What is “Pop Culture”? How does it affect women and they way that they think? Well, to begin with pop culture is any cultural production that has a mass audience; its many forms of expression and communication that the majority of the population could have access to – this could include movies, tv, dance, plays, music, books etc.. In class we watched a movie called Beyond Killing Us Softly, this was a movie about how media images impact girls and women. It really opened my eyes to a whole lot of stuff that I have never really thought about before, even though I’ve probably seen examples of it all thousands of times....

Over time ads have gotten worse and worse. In most ads men are seen as masculine, strong and active where as many women are seen as vulnerable, soft and gentle – not to mention the fact that in many ads show women in various sexual poses, this depicts the message that women are sexual objects. I bet, for at least 9 out of 10 ads containing women, if you took the text out it would resemble a snapshot from a pornography film.

Take these two ads for example. When you first look at them you see the womens' bodies, THEN you see what the actual ad is all about, a fragrance for men. So why is it a woman’s body in the ad for mens' fragrance? Because that’s what society has come down to, this idea of women as sexual objects is all over today’s advertisement.

Take a look at a few more pictures:  

  

One ad that totally blew my mind away was this one shown below, mainly because for the first 45 seconds I couldn’t figure out what the actual ad is trying to sell. Then I saw it. See that little tiny red car underneath the woman’s buttocks? Yep, it’s an ad for matchbox cars. Again, showing the woman in a sexual position thus making her vulnerable and some sort of sexual deviant.

All these ads degrading towards women and their body, they make little girls think that they HAVE to look this way otherwise guys won’t like them. Advertising is an underlying cultural message that feeds into many eating disorders because young women believe that what you weigh determines what your worth.  You rarely ever see women who are overweight, too short or too tall in media images, the women in the advertisement images of today are perfect in all aspects. “If women do not conform to the narrow object of beauty they then become a topic of laughter” – basically saying if you don’t look like those women in the media images, then you will be ridiculed because you aren’t “perfect”.

*All images were retrieved from Google Images *