Again?
Another ad featuring a naked woman and a fully clothed male. This time it’s rapper Kanye West and his model girlfriend, Amber Rose. This is a tired, boring, played out theme in advertising that objectifies women and consistently portrays the female form in a state of undress or near undress. Rarely, do we see ads in which the men are nude, with or without a dressed female in the picture. It just doesn’t happen.
What are young girls and women learning about the culture’s view of the female body when all around them images of teen girls and women are scantily clad if dressed at all. Viewing this phenomenon through George Gerbner‘s lens of cultivation, the building and maintenance of a stable set of images that reinforce one another and collectively construct reality, girls grow up in a culture in which it is not uncommon and is actually expected that girls and women will be highly sexualized objects.
This doesn’t even take into account the body language in this photo that reinforces stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. The strong, active and in-charge male with the passive female. In fact, Amber Rose doesn’t even appear human. She’s more of an accessory.
We see these themes in advertising time and time again. So, it’s not this one ad. It’s the countless ads that reinforce these themes over and over and over and over….
And then you have lawyers trying to prosecute kids as sex offenders for “sexting”, instead of going after the media that teaches them that what they are doing is ok, accepted and expected. It makes my head spin.
Comment by Jackie — April 22, 2009 @ 9:25 pm