Representations on Gender

Final Research Paper:

Representations on Gender

Melinda Justice

PSY 260: Perspectives on Gender

Leslie Minor-Evans

Final Research Paper

Due: February 6, 2007

[I] opened a volume of the catalogue, and……the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?...Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Virginia Woolf, 1929

Everyday we gaze upon objectified images of women, women as objects of ideal beauty, women as sex objects, and women literally transformed into objects. As a Business major with a Marketing concentration, I am naturally intrigued by the world’s media and advertisements. One concept has been consistently true throughout the world, “Sex sells.” This, “Sex” they usually refer to as, is consisted of females. Women’s sexual objectification is not about women expressing their own sexual desires; it is about women’s bodies presented as sexually alluring commodities for heterosexual men (Crawford, 2005). Not only are women being shown as sexual objects in men’s periodicals such as trashy magazines: Maxim, Stuff, and FHM, but women are also being objectified in advertisements within their own: Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Elle. With how much women are objectified by men as sexual objects, are women being targeted with similar advertisements leading women to self-objectify for a man’s concern?

Women are often stereotyped to fit certain myths or combinations of qualities that depict a traditional stereotype of femininity, such as brains or beauty. Countless cultural examples have told women they can either have a mind or a body, but not both

Wolf, 1991

Advertisements are loaded with objectified women, and only recently have the effects of objectification been explored. When examining various advertisements, one can see that there is most definitely an incline