Project 1 Proposal

Women have always been objectified in media, but the image medium for this objectification has been made ubiquitous in our every day thoughts, actions, and experience. Advertising is a form of communication and creation, but it also serves as an exploitation tactic to the idea or image that it wants to sell. The Capitalistic commodity of advertising sells as a portrayal of itself, working both sides of the coin as it distributes it's business incentive while simultaneously conforming it's image to embody societal norms and cultural values, which are of course stereotyped, and do not actually reflect the cultural reality of today.

Since the middle of the 1950's, the media image representation of women has evolved dramatically. What was once a magazine filled with commercials of vacuums and stovetops created for stay-at-home moms became a platform, calling for the "normalization" of women to wanting to have to better themselves. To adhere to present times and to apply their image to the new feministic wave, advertisers urged their female consumers to value self-appreciation and freedom. This would have been nice, if only the advertisers reinforced that shifting cultural value and reflected it by realistically portraying images of women being self-appreciative in every lifestyle, not just the one that seemed culturally fit.

Presenting the value of self-appreciation as an image crafted to encompass societal expectations of the "average" American woman persona has has major effects on women who don't find themselves being represented in that media persona. Over the decades, the media has white-washed representations of beauty in almost every major advertisement dedicated to women's beauty and cosmetics. Today, these major Eurocentric media outlets are continuing to culturally appropriate the exact same groups that they fail to represent in their media exemplars.
 
The focus of my project is to show how the media devolved from objectifying women through conservative portrayals and traditional images, to rapidly transforming it's focus to the image of  sexualization and total exploitation the woman's body in the name of creating an image to sell. If sex and sexual liberation were going mainstream on the front pages, so grew the now-omnipresent sexualization of women as objects rather than subjects.