The Objectification of Women in Advertising

The Objectification of Women in Advertising

Since the introduction of advertising many centuries ago, women have been repeatedly objectified, and in many instances, insulted or degraded because it appears that it is the easiest way for managers to capture the attention of the customers without having to go through the pain of coming up with innovative and meaningful advertisement campaigns. Instead they can simply get a good looking woman, doll her up, get her to wear skimpy clothes maybe say a few cheesy lines and voila ! You have your ad campaign. The worst part about this is that most of us do not object to all of this. This practice has become so pervasive that we do not even realize that we, as consumers, are actually fuelling this insidious objectification of women.

The discussion that we had in class was in context of a Spice jet advertisement where a woman dressed up smartly in red clothing was shown as a typical passenger. Now one could contest the notion of a typical passenger and as long as there was nothing vulgar about her portrayal, Spice Jet could not have been blamed for simply taking her in the ad. Naturally, there was a debate whether it was justified to use a woman because there was no need as such. What made matters worse was the fact that the tagline of Spice Jet, “Red. Hot. Spicy”, was right above the woman in the ad. Now anyone looking at the ad would instantly realize that the tagline was pointing towards the woman and it was a very cheap way to garner attention of potential customers (mostly men in this case because typically 80% of frequent flyers are males across all airlines and sectors).

Now one could argue that when we are talking about objectification, why not talk about the objectification that men are subjected to because that is also happening in our society. Granted that it is true, one cannot deny the fact that the frequency and the severity of women objectification is far greater than that of men’s. Given the kind of society that we live in, especially in India, we have to realize that for the greater part of our civilized history we have not allowed women to prosper and realize their true potential. Hence, as we strive to achieve an equal society for all the genders, it becomes imperative to eliminate all such forms of objectification. For this, as a society, we would have to first acknowledge and accept the fact that we are objectifying women to the extent that a lot of young girls and women lose their self-respect and fail to see themselves as anything more than a mere tool of catering to the needs and desires of the opposite sex. Then the second step would be to take appropriate measures to ensure that such practices are systematically eliminated and both men and women are made aware of their rights and responsibilities towards one another and towards our society as well.