Defining the Female Body

Throughout time, women have been featured in TV commercials, billboards, posters, and many other different variations of advertisements. Women constantly star in these advertisements in order to sell products such as yogurt, cereal, toothpaste, and even tools. These women tend to flaunt their best known features rather than their less distinct characteristics in order to catch the attention of the viewers. Consumers might find some advertisements a bit ridiculous such as half naked women pretending like they are using power tools, which begs the question, "What relation do they have with each other?" The American culture defines the female body in three major ways: an imperfect object, a tool to help advertise products, and an ideal 50's housewife.

Commercials and advertisements that are aimed at women primarily show how much "better" women could become with the use of that advertised product. These advertisements show beautiful models that are unnaturally thin which creates false expectations as to what the ideal female body should look like. Media claims that a "fat" figure is ugly and undesirable. Advertisers have these models wear or use the product which forces female consumers to unconsciously compare themselves to that model. This leads the female consumers to feel unattractive and insecure. The companies that do target women love this affect because studies have shown that this method of advertisement is the most successful. This leads to more products being sold, which means more profit. Almost every part of the model that people see on magazine covers, and billboards, has been retouched and edited. Document A clearly shows just how much of a change that Photoshop and other photo editing software can make to the way that a person looks. The side on the right is the before and the left is the after. One might notice that in the after picture, the woman's freckles are gone and her skin has been given more tone and more facial shadows, and the lips have been greatly increased.

Another way that the female body is defined in American culture is as a tool to sell products. Women have a huge hold on the media with a large number of advertisements being based around women. Why is this? Media use women in order to seduce the viewers by sexualizing products in advertisements. Source B shows an image of a woman's cleavage, highly out there and quite noticeable. The ad says, "Nice Headlamps. What do you look for in a car?" When the ad states the word, "Headlamps," it is referring to two different objects. One, being the woman's breasts and the other being the headlights of a car. There is no relationship between the breasts of the woman and the headlights of the car. This advertisement obviously wanted to catch the attention of the viewers by putting big boobs in the middle of the image. This might be successful as many people would need to fill their curiosity.

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