Everyday, you are bombarded with 5,000 advertisements. Even if you don't think ads affect you, it is difficult to imagine that an image you are exposed to 5,000 times per day has no influence at all. Sure, ads sell items, but they also have underlying messages, and these messages are probably not want we want our society to be based on.
In a class I'm taking this semester, Women, Gender and Sexuality, we are examining this very issue. Gene Kilbourne's films, "Killing Us Softly," from 1979, and "Still Killing Us Softly," from 1985 effectively convey the problem with many advertisements. The lecture is a little dated, but the same types of ads exist today. If we recognized the negative underlying messages of ads 30 years ago, why haven't we changed?
It is arguable that advertisements have even gotten worse. In ad after ad, men are portrayed as strong and active, and women are given helpless and passive roles. Many ads only show parts of women, dehumanizing them. Many more ads show women in sexual poses and as sexual objects. Take the text out, and some ads could be snapshots out of a pornography film.
What kind of message is this sending to society?
Men - dominant, active, strong, confident, energetic
Women - passive, sexual (yet innocent), helpless, weak
If this doesn't seem to be a big problem to you, think again. Everyday, thousands of women in the United States are victims of assault. Though the media is definitely not the sole cause of this tragedy, one cannot deny that advertisements do have a role in promoting this kind of behavior in society. I can only hope that sooner than later, advertisers will begin to eliminate ads which repress women and only picture them as the strong, independent, confident people they are.
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