Killing us softly ads and body image

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. This is the definition of advertising in Wikipedia but the question is what type of actions women are taking when watching ads.

Women are mostly the main character of any advertising appearing on television, internet, billboard or even a small flyer. How these ads are affecting women mental and physical health and how women are reacting towards these images.

First on the average American woman is exposed to 3000 advertising messages per day based onhttp://mortarblog.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/how-many-ads-do-we-see-every-day/

So let’s say that the Lebanese market is 1/10 the size of the American market, than we can assume that the Lebanese women see 300 ads per day which is a huge number.

Let’s not talk about music videos, movies and series as message tool we are just focusing on advertising. One of the facts released by www.mediawisechoice.com is that Within 3 minutes of looking at fashion magazines, 70% of women feel guilty, ashamed, and depressed.

To feel guilty, ashamed and depressed adding the low self esteem result push women to have an anorexic drive for example: With cigarettes like Virginia Slims and Super slims Light, tobacco advertising targeted to girls and women continues to link smoking to slimness and weight control. Adding on that real numbers height is usually about 5’8″, and average weight for a model is 108-125 lbs so please check this model image and tell me if any woman can look like that http://goo.gl/jFFCg.

Advertisers purposely normalize unrealistically thin bodies, in order to create an unattainable desire that can drive product consumption. To prove that let’s look on the diet industry numbers annual total at $58 billion spent on weight-loss products and services.

And if questions related to body image are:

How you see or picture yourself?

How you feel others perceive you?

What you believe about your physical appearance?

How you feel about your body?

How you feel in your body?

And the answers would be depressed, low self-esteem, ashamed, guilty, eating disorder, and fat, ugly, hairy.

Than ads are definitely destroying our body image.