Crass Diet An Exploration Into How Ads Shape Gender Disparities for Women
Crass Diet: An Exploration Into How Ads Shape Gender Disparities for Women. ... The above statement found in “Unbearable Weight” is a horrifyingly accurate synopsis of how social discourses for women, mold, and in effect control how women feel about what they eat. In this essay, I will examine two advertisements, aimed at women dieters, and I will seek to explain how food, sexuality and self control are inextricably linked to control women’s minds, bodies, and spirits. Through this analysis, I will first explain why these advertisements in particular are accurate portrayals of how women are “brainwashed” by advertisers. Next, I will describe the ads rhetoric, both textually and visually, describing how words and images use a combined effort to control their viewers, giving a possible refutation as well. The analysis section will specifically focus on how food advertisements are explicitly related to how social discourses are used to control and shape women’s sexuality and desirability to men,. Then finally, I will conclude with how these advertisements seek to destroy and control women’s self-image in order to normalize dieting, by making the slender body the only acceptable skin to be in. After spending countless hours, flipping through magazines aimed at British women, southern women, dieting women, high class women, mothers, organic women, and black and Hispanic women, to name a few, I finally came upon two images that showed the gender disparities for women particularly well. ... Both ads were aimed at women whom were trying to shape their figures, and both ads played with the notion of desire and sexuality as an integral component of their product. Interestingly as well, both ads marketed, “junk diet food”, food which is commonly craved by women dieters, since it is forbidden, but is packaged and marketed in diet form, in order to seize upon women’s weaknesses. ... When explaining the importance of visual technique used to explain the gender disparities set for women, it is important to take notice of visual cues which are not mere coincidences, but rather speak for society’s’ discourses in telling what is acceptable/unacceptable for women. ... Many of the ads in Bordo’s book show the same thing, as in the Jell-O ad on page 113. ... This is quite commonly used in advertisements for women eating rich and indulgent foods as a reference for how they indelibly will act in the bedroom. ... Making “smart” choices like fat reduced pizza and restricting you’re intake will “show” in the bedroom, when women are most vulnerable, as the controlled restriction will eventually slenderize the body, thereby making women more attractive where and when it counts. ... Also important in both ads is portion control and the fact that both women are seen alone with their food in the ads. Bordo explains repeatedly that this is commonly used as a blueprint of sorts for how women relate to their hunger and food, “The representation of unrestrained appetite as inappropriate for women, the depiction of female eating as private, transgressive act, make restriction and denial of hunger central features of the construction of femininity and set up the compensory binge as a virtual inevitability” (Bordo, 130).