I was given this ad in my mailbox at work. My initial response was, “What am I supposed to do with this?” Although, I realize this is an ad for tanning, and the most socially accepted way to advertise tanning is by showing people in bathing suits, I felt that this ad specifically was more provocative than necessary. The name of the company is “Bronze Beauties,” so it is obvious that they are targeting women rather than men. I suppose they think that spraying color on your body is a feminine thing. This ad is frustrating to me because it assumes that only women want to look tan. It also assumes that to be beautiful you must be tan. So the ad has already implied that women are not beautiful enough unless they are tan, and then it sticks a woman, barely dressed, on the front of the ad. This woman shows society’s unrealistic standards of beauty and makes a girl feel even more insecure. Now, surely this woman is beautiful in her own way and has every right to show off her body, but with such diverse types of women throughout the world, it is insulting to presume that this specific type of physical appearance is the one that embodies “beauty.” And in terms of beauty, why is beauty purely physical? If beauty is more than physical, then this ad says to me: “Women, no one cares about your personality, opinions, mind, or ideas; you are only beautiful if you look this way, the rest is not important.”
I feel as if the media is always trying to “fix” us, as women. You need to do this or you need to do that in order to be acceptable. As our book says, “The aim is to promote insecurity, self-hatred, and distorted perceptions of size, appetite, and attractiveness, so that we will consume the countless products, diet plans, and cosmetic surgeries marketed to remedy our alleged deficiencies” (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 208). We have been made to feel so terrible about ourselves and our physical appearance that we are going on and being cut open and having things taken out and things put in. And what for? For beauty? Are a few extra inches around my waist really preventing me from being beautiful? Is the pigmentation of my skin what makes me attractive? NO! Absolutely not. So why are we subjecting ourselves to surgeries and extreme diet plans? What about accepting ourselves the way we were created and appreciating our differences and our own individual forms of beauty. It’s a crazy thought, I know.
Works Cited
Kirk, Gwyn and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives 4th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.
http://www.bronzebeauties.net/
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteYou have done a good job of looking at the ad and trying to unpack what it says as a cultural text. Oe thing you need to work o n is unpacking and drawing explicit connections between the text and your analysis.