Women & Advertising

This ad is shocking. It is an advertisement selling Accurist watches but that is almost irrelevant since you would never even be able to tell what it is trying to get you to notice apart from the naked girl bound up and gagged. I was completely surprised at how easy it was to find advertisements offensive to women. This ad is selling a watch for goodness sake, but for some reason, the woman has to be naked and that is because: SEX SELLS; and it is often at the expense of women. Women are constantly being used, sexualized, portrayed as objects/play-things for male desire. Advertisers know that portraying a woman scantily clad (and in this case naked), is going to catch people’s attention. This ads tone is dangerous, dark and seductive, and has the words “me time” printed on it. This almost implies that when a woman can be alone and have the freedom to be herself she will do things that are sinful and taboo. It goes back to the idea of essentialism, and that all women are inherently sinful seductresses. What Accurist is essentially trying to convey, is that if you buy their watches, you will be a little bit decadent, sinful, and seductive yourself. It is such a ridiculous concept, really. In almost all advertisements portraying women, the women are sexualized and their bodies become tools used to advertise the products and their messages. But what kind of messages are they sending? This advertisement advocates violence against women. It is saying that in our culture, a woman being tied up and gagged is sexy, and maybe even “high fashion.” It just goes back to what the dominant culture has deemed to be “sexy” and acceptable. However, if a man were to go against “the path of least resistance” as Johnson’s “Patriarchy The System” described, he would be ridiculed by other men who believe that he is less of a man if he is not ok with women being depicted like that. Like Johnson explains, it is not men, it is not even the advertisers, it is the system that we live in which believes that women shown in brutalized, and subordinate positions on the floor, and on their back, is actually a “sexy” thing. Never mind the messages the ad is conveying about Patriarchy and female subordination, it is giving young girls an idea of what they should look and act like. They should like being gagged and bound, and they should be of all things: skinny.

This woman depicted in the ad is not what most women look like. They are not all bronzed up, long-limbed and skinny. Real women are healthy, and happy, and strong and this advertisement shows none of those things.   

Works Cited : 

kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Women's Lives Multicultural Perspectives. 5th ed. New York, NY, 2010. p.94. Print.  

Johnson, Allan. "Patriarchy, The System." (1997): Print.