The Mythical WASP Oriented World of Advertising

Mina Youn
Media 384
Prof. Cacoili
March 18, 2017

The Mythical WASP Oriented World of Advertising

Images of thin, beautiful, white women adorn every surface of our lives, from magazine covers, billboards, television commercials and even clothing store mannequins, constantly reminding and reinforcing the standard of beauty we struggle to embody. Jean Kilbourne distills advertising into a “mythical, WASP-oriented world in which no one is ever ugly, overweight, poor, struggling or disabled either physically or mentally (122). She further mentions that “women are constantly exhorted to emulate this ideal, to feel ashamed and guilty if they fail, and to feel that their desirability and lovability are contingent upon physical perfection” (122). The main focus of advertisements is to sell products, and in order to sell products, companies use the insecurities of the consumers to make them feel like they must buy into the sell to solve their problems or to subscribe to a certain way of life or type of person. Concepts of masculinity and femininity are sold in this way and “such symbolic images in advertising attempt to create an association between the products offered and social desirable ad meaningful traits in order to produce the impression that if one wants to be a certain type of person, for instance, to be a “real man,” then one should buy Marlboro cigarettes (Kellner 127).

A vintage ad that sells a Pyrex baking dish in which a wife is seductively bent over the oven in a wedding dress. The sell here is that successful marriages start in the kitchen and women should use such products to cook and cook well for their husbands.

In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf examines advertisement in a historical context, especially women’s magazines. According to Wolf, “women’s magazines for over a century have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women’s roles, and throughout that time – today more than ever – they have consistently glamorized whatever their economy, their advertisers, and during wartime, the government, needed at that moment from women” (64). Magazines, especially, are important in spreading, creating and reinforcing culture. The Beauty Myth highlights the power of women’s magazines as a source of “women’s mass culture” (70). Wolf sums up the chaotic struggle of the relationship between ownership, readership and authorship of such magazines: “Like its readers, the magazine must pay for its often serious, prowoman content with beauty backlash trappings; it must do so to reassure its advertisers, who are threatened by the possible effects on women’s minds of too much excellence in women’s journalism. The magazines’ personalities are split between the beauty myth and feminism in exactly the same way those of their readers are split” (71).

A compilation of of Glamour magazine covers in which most of the women are white, thin and beautiful.

Ms. magazine’s decades long fight with advertisers shed light on how difficult it can be to protect their content from the negativity of sexism and racism of ads. The co-founder of Ms. describes her gradual, inevitable running of Virginia Slims ads as a “kind of prison” in which she realized “the naiveté in thinking [Ms.] could decide against taking cigarette ads [which] became a disproportionate support of magazines the moment they were banned on television, and few magazines could compete and survive without them: certainly not Ms. which lacks so many other categories” (116). She further goes on to note companies’ lack of ads of people of color, calling her magazine’s ads white enough to make a reader “snowblind” and when faced with confrontation on such issues, the response of such companies like L’Oreal and Lauder was that ‘your white readers won’t identify’” similar to how “marketing a product to women will endanger is appeal to men” (118). Gloria Steinem’s interaction of Estee Lauder president sums up the relationship between ownership and ads is the best possible way. After listening to her appeal to use his ads in her struggling magazine, citing their literary and social achievements, even emphasizing the lucrative opportunity to reach a demographic of readers inaccessible through any other magazine, Mr. Lauder rejects Ms. simply because “Ms. readers are not our women” (119).

A modern day Estee Lauder ad that tries to bring back the 1950s glamour. This is most like the "kept women" look that Mr. Lauder wants his women to emulate and sell for. The tag line says: Shake. Stir. Seduce. 

Advertisements permeate every aspect of our media, and over the recent years, the reach and scope of the Internet has increasingly changed the game, but not the message. Even blogs are littered with ads, distracting readers from the main content, by flashing across the headers, footers and sidebars, often using web-enabled cookies to access your favorite or recent searches and plugging them into our minds. According to Estee Lauder president, “beauty features are often concocted more for advertisers than readers” (119). You begin to question, at what point is content created for the sole purpose of spreading information, culture, beauty, joy and instead created for the sole purpose of advertising? Product placement in films and television is one of the major sources of revenue for the film industry and cable networks. Youtube does not play a video without those pesky five second ads interrupting a stream. Famous Youtubers and bloggers alike create actual content around sponsored products, often disguising their posts as genuinely their own or blatantly disclosing they are being sponsored and openly reviewing the product for income and exposure. As media consumers, we gobble up these kinds of micro-advertisements, because they are now transformed from a regular product to a trendy, cool must-have.

            Ads inevitably end up shaping and creating our culture, as seen with the historical advertising and marketing methods in the 1950s and onwards. Kilbourne wisely says that “advertising images do not cause these problems but they contribute to them by creating a climate by which the marketing of women’s bodies – the sexual sell and dismemberment, distorted body image ideal and children as sex objects – is seen as acceptable” (125). Instead of telling women to be housewives or beautiful and thin, advertisements and the industry as a whole need to reevaluate what messages to send. The harm done by these ads in destroying women’s confidence and body image, hopefully, with time will be rectified, if we take action and start creating our own. There needs to be more exposure as well, such as this New York Times article that exposes the negativity of the advertising industry on women's body image. 

Works Cited

Kellner, Douglas. “Reading Images Critically: Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy.” pp. 126-132.

Kilbourne, Jean. “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising”. pp. 121-125.

Steinem, Gloria. “Sex, Lies and Advertising.” pp. 112-120.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. Chatto & Windus, 1990.