‘Beauty is the bait with which delight allures man to enlarge his kind.’ said Socrates. The secret of beauty and attractiveness has been a quest of humans for as long as we have been civilized. According to research, many women spend up to one-third of their income on looking good. For years, women have been seen as a symbol of beauty and men as a symbol of power. In the film Killing Us Softly 3 by Jean Kilbourne, it is made clear that women are symbolized as sex objects in advertisements. Kilbourne shows through pictures from advertisements that women arealmost always shown as the weakest and men as the strongest. For Kilbourne, men are not living in a world where they are raped or beaten as woman are. Through advertisements we can see that masculinity is often linked with violence and the females are often devalued in society. Also, people often compare themselves with others in their daily lives. Even when watching tv commercials, there is a tendency to make comparisons with the models that they see. It is true that when we see a beautiful woman or a handsome man, we can’t succeed in not making comparisons. This is a law of nature that the beautiful or the handsome ones are being envied all the time.
Physical attractiveness is a very sensitive issue for many women. Even in advertising, the use of highly attractive models is believed to be effective in increasing sales. Why else would we advertisers spend so much to show us beautiful models all of the time? Most women are trying to be as the women they see in the billboards or on television. Girls start to behave like models from the beginning of adolescence. They are putting on make-up, they are trying to be thin so as a result they are losing their natural beauty. In the Sunday Telegraph, Matthew McDonald said ’In the end, every woman has to follow her own inner beauty gun.’ It is a big question mark whether we fall in love with a natural beauty or an imitation of someone else. What I think is that the one we love must be the one that we are linked to by thoughts. Research from Arizona University revealed that the one we love is someone that we find ourselves in, the inner beauty or the acceptance in thoughts is more important than the outer beauty. Instead of trying to be someone like a supermodel we should be different and we should prove the soul inside us because each of us has our own natural beauty.
However, woman still have the role of the weakest in the televison or in commercials. Women are the ones that are being maltreated. In society, they often face with violence and injustice.This occasion can also be seen in the advertisments; in the Killing Us Softly 3, it is said that even in the commercials of important brands like Calvin Klein, we can easily see the difference between a passive girl and an active boy. What I think is, this should be the opposite. It is known that woman are thought of as weak in society, but actually it is not like that; woman are strong, powerful and brave enough to do everything they want but they are the symbols of weakness in the contrast to man. In advertisements, by showing women as powerful can change those absurd thoughts in a society. In the Dailymail Magazine by Lowri Turner it is said that the only difference between men and women is that the man has larger bones in the constrast to women. So it is ridiculous to say that men are the most powerful.
All in all, those efforts to be like a Victoria’s Secret Angel are nothing more than a dream because those angels have the natural beauty which we all have, but didn’t come out to the appearance. I think that advertisements are big role models for young people but to tell the truth, they are not setting a good example. So there should be a change which must be profound and global. We should not change the ads but also these attitudes that run so deep in our culture. Without the pressures of being physically beautiful, men and women, boys and girls have an ability to have authentic freely chosen lives and nothing less.
ARINÇ BİLGE
11A 177
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