SEX AND ADVERTISING

Advertisers often emphasize sexuality and the importance of physical attractiveness in an attempt to sell products, but researchers are concerned that this places undue pressure on women and men to focus on their appearance.

 

Researchers suggest advertising media may adversely impact women's body image, which can lead to unhealthy behavior as women and girls strive for the ultra-thin body idealized by the media. Girls of the current generation are most interested in what the media has to say about what the perfect body is. Music videos and movies seem to play a large impact on girls, but ads do no less damage. Advertisements in magazines, commercials on the internet all suggest that one must strive to have a model-like body. 

 

Some statistics: The average woman sees 400 to 600 advertisements per day and by the time she is 17 years old, she has received over 250,000 commercial messages through the media.

 

In fact, today's fashion models weigh 23% less than the average female, and a young woman between the ages of 18-34 has a 7% chance of being as slim as a catwalk model and a 1% chance of being as thin as a supermodel.

 

Many health professionals are also concerned by the prevalence of distorted body image among women, which may be fostered by their constant self-comparison to extremely thin figures promoted in advertisements. 

 

There isn’t a direct link between the sexuality in advertisement in advertisements and women’s body image. In fact it is a three-step process.

 

 

The first one being that ads nowadays are more interested in promoting women who portray a sexual appeal, in sexual attire irrespective of their significance in the ad. This then leads to the second step of women readers considering these models to be the “ideal and most desired woman” which then leads to the final step of eating disorders to try and achieve this type of image leading to large scale and severe disorders like anorexia. 

 

How can we prove it? Surveys suggest that 83% of adolescent girls read fashion magazines for an average of 4.3 hours per week. It has been proven that fashion magazines significantly impact the process of identity development in young women.