The Role Of Sexism In Advertising

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“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.” - George Orwell
A swill bucket is a slop bucket that farmers keep garbage in order to feed their pigs. In this analogy, the public are the pigs that eat up the garbage that the farmers (advertisers) feed to society. Essentially Orwell is implying that advertisements are trash that the public eats up. The public is constantly surrounded by advertisements, promotions, and commercials, which influence how society thinks. The main goal of an advertisement is to sell a product, but advertisements sell more than products; they sell ideas. Advertisements define how the culture of today’s society views women by objectifying the female body, creating unrealistic standards of the female
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Similarly, while sexism has been reduced significantly as society progresses, certain forms of sexism are still common today. Advertisements are considered sexist when they insinuate that a certain gender is better or worse than another gender, or when they imply that an androgynous product should be used for one specific gender. For instance, an advertisement for Samsung offers a buy one, get one deal where if the customer buys a washing machine, the customer would receive a free vacuum cleaner. The advertisement features a saying: “cross your mother’s mind twice a day”. This advertisement insinuates that the woman (wife, mother) of the house will be the only one doing the cleaning. It confines women to the role the typical housewife. Advertisements like this one promote the idea that cleaning house is exclusively a woman’s duty. “I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be..” (Syfers 1016). Women are typically categorized as wives who are responsible for the cooking, cleaning, and various other housework duties, which is demeaning to …show more content…
If an advertisement promotes a certain idea in order to sell a product, the public will often follow that idea. Because the public is constantly surrounded by advertisements, advertisements have a big impact on how the public views the world. According to George Orwell, advertisements feed the public ideas and the public eats it up, like pigs eat up slop. Advertisements influence how today’s society views women by turning women into sexual objects, forming impractical expectations of women, and by the use of sexist themes. When advertisements depict women a certain way, the public begins to regard women in that way. While sexist advertisements are not as common as they were in previous decades, they still exist in today’s society. These advertisements create issues for women because they establish an unrealistic, unfair image of women. These issues still exist because sexist advertisements are still being promoted to

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