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It is almost impossible to avoid advertisement today if you want to consume mediaIt is very well thought out, and it is designed to make you feel whatever emotion is most capable of turning you into a ravenous consumer. Advertising is sectioned off to deal with different demographics in different ways. Women and girls are made to feel worthless and ugly in order to convince them to buy products that will get them more acceptance and love from the people around them. Even advertisements that run during children’s cartoons start to socialize girls to fit the role that society has waiting for them. As Jean Kilbourne puts in her Cutting Girls Down, “…a message that an adolescent girl constantly gets from advertising and throughout the popular culture, the message that she should diminish herself, she should be less than she is,” (136-7).  Not only are we told that we are not good enough, but we are told that the solution is to buy products to make up for what we lack.

It is no coincidence that advertising companies are trying to send this message. When Henry Ford invented the assembly line, it revolutionized the industrial system of the United States, and spiked the supply of goods that were available. The immediate problem was that people were not used to consuming as much as was being produced, and so advertising and marketing came into play in order to supply the mass consumerism that had to coincide with all the new products, (Captains of Consciousness, 25). Soon after this industrial boom, World War I commenced and many men left their jobs to serve in the military. Women filled those jobs while they were gone. The problem arose when the men came home from war and assumed that their jobs would be waiting for them, when in fact, most women wanted to remain in that current job instead of returning to work in the home (Wolf, 63). Of course this would not stand and so a plan had to be devised to bring women back into their homes so that men returning from war could resume their positions and gendered society could continue on as normal. Advertising made a big push towards domestic ideas, and women were responsive to this technique. Once women were back in their classic housewife role, more efforts were made to keep them there. In the chapter “Culture” of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, she says “Marketers made concerted efforts to ‘make housework a matter of knowledge and skill, rather than a matter of brawn and dull unremitting effort.” They wanted to make women who worked at home feel that their work there was just as important as the work being done for pay outside of the house.

           We can see these marketing ideals manifesting themselves in entertainment media in an episode of The Donna Reed Show, a sitcom from the late 1950’s to mid 1960’s about a house wife and her family. In one specific episode, Donna is shopping at the supermarket where there is a radio show host conducting a segment that he calls “The Housewives’ Corner.” He asks the women in the supermarket, who seem mostly to be housewives, trivial and demeaning questions until he reaches Donna, who takes issue with his tone and his labeling her “just a housewife.” Donna later comes to her husband about this idea, to which he responds by asserting that just like a chair is a chair, Donna is a housewife. In the end, Donna gets another chance to talk to the radio show host and through conversational wit, pins him into declaring that each housewife is actually many different professionals all in one, like a nurse, a psychologist, and a diplomat. The problem is that after she makes her point the world goes back to normal and nothing is changed. This rhetoric fits perfectly into the ideas that the advertising industry was trying to indoctrinate middle class housewives with at the time. Their empowerment through and pride in their role as a housewife, but never the change of or movement away from that role.

Advertisement found in Vogue France

            If we look at this current advertisement found in Vogue France, we can see a hypersexualized child, used for the sake of selling not just clothes but a lifestyle to its customers. The age of the model in the ad is completely disregarded and she is treated as though she were a fully matured woman. Her makeup, wardrobe, and pose reflect no aspect of childhood, and only that of a sexy woman. Images like this are everywhere and there are only so many instances that little girls can see things like this not have it make a huge impact on the development of their self-esteem. On top of this, for the most part only one type of woman is portrayed in advertisements: the thin, straight, classically beautiful white woman. Left out are women of color, women with different body types, and members of the LGBTQ community.

            Instagram has several of its own newly developed ways of providing an advertising platform. Many brands reach out to account holders with a large audience and pay that person directly to promote their product. In this way they are getting up close and personal with their target consumers and have an even better chance of influencing them if the endorsement of the product is coming from an account that those consumers support and trust. One of the things that feels different about this is the potential for small businesses to reach out to larger audiences than they would have been able to otherwise. The process is pretty DIY, as laid out this word stream page, just one of many sites dedicated to telling the average person how to utilize Instagram advertising.

Works Cited

Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. Langara College, 2004.

Kilbourne, Jean. Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. Vintage Classic, 2015.