Women as the muse for commercialism and marketing

In the city there is a tremendous amount of advertising, which makes perfect sense as capitalist cities are geared towards income generation thus relies on consumerism which relies on sound advertising and marketing practices. It was interesting, the amount of advertisements that incorporated the use of the female image and references to females in its campaigns. The female image was used to sell lots of products and services; clothes, hair care products, food, cars and alcohol.

‘The devaluation of the woman and all things feminine has caused subsidence in all aspects of society. The girl is taught that she must be attractive, courteous, virtuous and entertaining so that a man could enjoy her company and want to keep her around’ (Adichie, 2012).The society we live in professes to be a tolerant, male/female, ‘normal sexual’, sexy yet/and respectable society but in fact we live in a society where all-inclusive just means free food and drinks at an event and nowhere puts these ideals on display on giant billboards and store signs like the city. Our society is one where male means anti-female and female means anti-everyone because girls do not do common struggle and all men are dogs. Socially accepted physical bodies are associated with products as marketing strategies with the ‘Carib girl,’ the girl with the ‘unbeweaveable’ weave, the super sexy business women becoming major personas being advertised in society along with the associated consumer goods and services that are usually able bodied, socially accepted beautiful/exotic people. We advertise, buy and sell sex (both in terms of referrals to gender and sexual connotations) and I mean that literally and figuratively and sometime we are not aware of our participation the subliminal messages we send, receive and act on and how they relates to our social problems (specifically gender based violence and discrimination). These projected personas then become objectified people and the objectified person in a black or brown body is then fetishized and oppressed. It is difficult to oppress or assert yourself over a human being but then when the human has been worn down and relegated to a breathing object it is as easy as making sexual advances to a possibly under aged girl in public at broad daylight with no condemnation or redress. 

References

Adichie, C. 2012. TEDxEuston (transcript) ‘We should all be Feminists’. Vialouge.