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For many female consumers, advertising is inspirational. Advertising allows a form of escapism that many women welcome and indeed pursue. As with other photographs and most artistic media, there exists an implicit understanding that what is depicted is not necessarily a mirror reflection of real life – and to many viewers this is the very attraction of the images. Advertisement sends mixed messages by promoting over indulgences of food, while at the same time emphasizing thinness a standard of beauty.
The models in the advertising reflect how many women want to be, which is why they are used to advertise fashion brands in the first place. Women welcome such pictures as a way of affirming their own focus on certain elements of aesthetic attractiveness. The glamour of the fashion industry in general and its advertising campaigns in particular is a welcome input to the humdrum existence led by many of the people who consume the pictures. They are grateful for the chance to engage in fantasizing vicariously about a glamorous, fashionable lifestyle.
Advertising featuring slim and tiny waisted women plays on female insecurities. Through the use of these women in consumer advertising, advertisers clearly link identification as a successful woman with consumption. This is a particularly vicious circle for people who lack the funds to feed this consumptive habit. Through its near relentless focus on ideal type models, advertising also pressurizes women into conforming to a “perfect” body. This increases the likelihood of eating disorders, as well
As the pursuit of unnecessary cosmetic surgery, anti-ageing treatment etc, and it also urges young girls to take on smoking or drugs in order to suppress hunger to keep that body image that they want.
The body images shown in many magazines not only effect female readers but they also effect men, who want their wives or girlfriends to become something like the person shown in the magazine or TV . Jean Kilbourne, the Author of Cant Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes The Way We Think And Feel, sheds light on this fact that how much young women are pressured, not only to please themselves but their partners to, ” Many young women have told me their boyfriends wanted them to lose weight. One said that her boyfriend had threatened to leave her if she didnt lose five pounds”. This is something that makes these young women turn to unhealthy ways to accomplish a body Image that not only pleases them but the people around them to.
Magazines are also playing a very prominent role in sending these messages to women and girl. Magazines like Cosmopolitan that shows girls who are paper thin with their hip bones sticking out to a point where it looks painful. A bra add for Calvin Kline (attached) sends mixed messages out to women, it shows a young girl wearing in her underwear sitting down, and the add reads, “Perfectly Fit, new fit, total comfort” this add sends out two different kinds of messages to women, first that they have to be perfectly fit, in order to be comfortable in this expensive kind or underwear. Another add from the same magazine reads, “Add size Where You Really Want It”, this add is about a supplement that