A beautiful lady in red comes along, the whole noisy mass turns silent and stares at her, the lady with slow pace starts walking on the wall; her red dress liquefies and becomes the paint of the wall. Literally, Dulux Paints is a company that makes paint out of female bodies.Women objectification in advertisements is an issue that has come to rise along with sellers focusing on ‘beauty queens’ as point of attraction for buyers of the products. But the definition of this beauty is also designed in a way that is causing the women community to lag in a lot of ways.
Beauty has been defined either as extreme fairness, or extreme thin, impossibly hot and sexy, with not a single scar or shades in her face. In short, beauty is defined by Photoshop. However, the bigger problem is that this beauty is thought to be a sample or a model and is attempted to attain by the normal viewers of the advertisements.
The beauty shown in those ads starts becoming a problem when the normal viewers imitate those things with a wish of having the same beauty; which is impossible. Ads these days portray an extremely thin lady to be the sexiest one preferred by men. When this reach out to girls, their unconscious minds then adopt a perception that to be beautiful they needs to be thin. Then they start eating less, aim for the zero size and have daily measurements of progress. In short, ads have made girls believe that their beauty is more important than their health.
Another definition of beauty, as portrayed by the ads is fairness. The Fair and Lovely ad series have consistently adopted a common ground where they show a girl, who is frustrated for her dark complexion, finds this magic cream and then starts grabbing success, either as an air hostess, or a magazine cover picture. One classical ad of this product shows a poor dad where he regrets for not having a son, and the dark girl then adopts fair and lovely to become successful and thus play the role of a son in the family. The real problem is when women start to believe this magic to happen, which doesn’t happen for sure for this is a Photoshop magic.
As a result, when girls fails to become as beautiful as the lady portrayed in the ads, when they fails to be that thin, tall and fair, they will start having a guilt. How back, does the issue of self- reliance of women, then goes!
Advertisements sell more than one products. The normal people watching those ads get inspired by more than just one product. Their subconscious mind adopts those ads in such a way that their concepts and values also get affected. Looking at the ad of SX4 car, where a man ignores the delivery of his wife by choosing a drive in the car, the normal men perceptions sees that they need to remain far from the women business, and that their luxury is more important than their wife and children.
Ads show beautiful women lips, where a drop of Slice is held, so as to give publicity to Slice. At times, women body appears or disappears as per the smell of the deodorant. The pocket size Pepsi ad was given the publicity through an ad where a lady keeps the bottle in her back pocket. The view makes it difficult to determine whether it’s the publicity of Pepsi itself or something else. Same is the issue with ads of jeans pants. When female bodies are presented with more focus than the products, what are the sellers wanting us to buy! The products or female body parts?
Author: Prabin Basyal
