Whenever you see the magazines such as People, Playboy, and The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, the first thing that sticks out is the how the women are portrayed in the magazines. In mostly all of these magazines, the women are wearing basically no clothing, are beautiful, tend to be in a classy place, and are trying to look as sexy as possible. This is how I thought all women were like. These women are shown to us as a symbol of sex rather more than anything else, because of companies wanting to grab the attention of the viewer. The companies with advertisements in the magazines think that they can get more viewers to buy what their advertising if they put in a half naked good-looking lady in them instead of something of a different nature. This portrays women as objects in our society rather than a real whole human being, however it does work, and definitely made me look at the advertisement as a young kid. Sometimes I would go to my mom and ask her if we could buy what the picture was advertising just because it had a beautiful lady in it.
However, I believe that portraying women like this puts a lot of pressure on young women today in our society and makes young men think of women differently. This sends a message to young women telling them what is attractive and what is not attractive. It also puts pressure on them explaining that being sexually attractive and sexually active is profound. If our celebrities who everyone looks up to can act like this, than why shouldn’t young girls be able to act like this. I think that the media can use different images and ideas to sell their advertisements instead of naked women.
I completely agree with just about everything you said. I love reading ESPN The Magazine and Sports Illustrated, and I do think magazines are an underrated source of news and entertainment. I wish magazines and other advertising articles and such used things other than revealing women to try and sell things because young girls do get a lot of pressure on them growing up, but I do have to admit, half-naked girls do sell.
ReplyDeleteWhat you explained is what i believe to be one of the biggest problems in our culture today. I remember seeing my first sports illustrated magazine when i was 8. I stole it from my dad and was confused when i looked inside. I think i thought my dad was cheating on my mom or something. So i showed it to my mom and asked her "is dad cheating on you?". She just started laughing. One of the big problems with the portrayal of women is that the photoshop how they look so much that the way the appear in the photo is not humanly possible to attain.
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