The Beauty of Advertising

It has been said that on average, people in modern society are exposed to roughly 3,000 advertisements over the course of a 24-hour time frame. At first, this might seem somewhat shocking, even absurd, but if you pause and think about, it’s true! We live in a society dominated by images and videos of everything from underwear to cars. Pretty much every aspect of our lives can be advertised in some way, shape, or form. An article written by Margaret Duncan entitled Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference: Images of Women and Men in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games provided an in-depth analysis and critique on the inner workings of the making of sports photographs. Duncan mentions that the photographs are produced in a way that projects a story, which we, as the consumers, read. More importantly, Duncan believes that photographs are “subjected to artificial processes and social uses that make them as much interpretations of reality as any other visual medium” (1990, 23). What makes a photograph effective is its ability to serve as a commodity. For Duncan, photographs are “objects of consumption in several senses” (1990, 24). The notion of ‘pornography’ as a description of photographic advertisements is echoed both in Duncan’s article as well as in this week’s reading entitled Consuming Faith: Advertising, the Pornographic Gaze and Religious Desire. In this article Santana and Erickson claim that the culture of consumerism “readily yields to the pornographic gaze and its power to seduce buyers” (2008, 51). As an example, the body positions, facial expressions, and emotional displays of women are depicted in often-sexual ways in order to achieve a desired look that will ultimately entice the consumer. As mentioned in lecture, advertising is fundamentally rooted in stimulating desire for commodities in order to sell a particular product. In this case, the objective of stimulating desire and selling their product leads advertisers to create unrealistic images in order to attract the consumer’s desire. This becomes problematic given that the “pervasive use of women as commodified sexual objects in advertisements” (Santana and Erickson 2008, 62) is so widespread in our society. Should advertising agencies be penalized for using ‘pornographic’ advertisements? Are these advertisements ultimately perpetuating a kind of gender norm that strictly regard women as commodities to be used only for personal benefits or satisfaction? Moreover, does advertising ‘distort our perception of beauty’ as exclaimed in the Dove campaign below?