Sunday, November 13, 2016

Advertisement Deconstruction

It is common knowledge that many advertisements are very controversial for the ways they portray certain groups of people or for the products they are advertising to their targeted audience. For example, cigarette companies are often ridiculed for targeting teens and young adults with their advertisements. However, it was not until I deconstructed a popular beer commercial that I realized how many stereotypes existed in this commercial. Prior to deconstructing this commercial I never really thought twice about the advertisement or the stereotypes it was showing. For this advertisement in particular it showed many stereotypes of women. In the commercial it seemed that the sole purpose of the women was to be around the man. Whenever they were around him they were laughing and enjoying themselves. All of the women were thin, beautiful and dressed very elegantly. It gave the notion that the sole purpose of these women was to please the man and cater to him. It was as if the women wanted nothing more then to spend as much time with him as possible. The man was portrayed as a strong, masculine, charismatic and mysterious person. It was very obvious that this was the reason that the women were so attracted to him.

It was very frustrating to see that this sexism is still so apparent in every day advertisements. These are commercials on national television that are seen by millions of men, women, teenagers, and children. These types of messages continue to embed messages of sexism into our society. It also shows our children and young adults that men are only attracted to young, skinny, beautiful and elegantly dressed women and that their sole purpose is to gain the attention of a desirable man. These are dangerous messages that we are portraying to our young generation of girls. Although these advertisements appear in new forms of media it seems that they continue to show stereotypes in harmful and damaging ways.

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