Women and Capitalism: The Fight over Power
We live in an asexual society. The public sphere is desexualized by our conformity with business suits, military suits, etc. Advertising is the sexual explosion displayed in this disciplined, repressed sexual system that we live in. Advertising comes directly from capitalism; in fact it’s the voice of capitalism. To understand the effect and influence of advertising, we need to look at capitalism.
Now, no other country spends more on advertising than America does. According to Dr. Michael Strangelove, a Communications Professor at the University of Ottawa, 20 cents of a product goes towards the cost of the product while the other 80 cents goes towards the advertising for it. Each political party needs to cultivate 1 billion dollars to allocate towards advertising in order to be in the running. So, that’s 1 billion dollars to tell the citizens of America that you are the best candidate and will do them no wrong, or… the least amount of damage.
Advertisements are designed to make the audience feel a bit anxious; they do this to engage the viewers, similar to news. This is why we see men usually having the upper hand in some way in advertisements with women or women with men. We see advertisements that are increasingly blurring the lines of what is decent and what is not, yet we accept both – this is the pornogrification of the advertisement industry. There are some advertisements where we see the woman using the product in a similar to the way they would to a penis; thus, directly linking the woman to a sexual context. Also we often are displayed women in beer adverts holding the beer product close to the breasts, by doing so it associates the product to mother’s milk.
The marketplace determines what the appropriate behaviour is for society and for the culture. It defines relationships, how each party interacts, and how to present yourself. Advertising’s job consists of two aspects: 1) to display reality in order for the audience to be able to relate to it (ideas of which are drawn from society itself); and 2) to distort reality for the audience to see what they desire and what they should become. So, advertisements are not unusual enough that it alienates the target audience that the advert is aiming to please. Yet it does create a sense of tension in order for the audience to feel like they are not good enough to be the elite like the figures displayed in these adverts. By creating this yearning and pressure, the audience will then seek to obtain whatever product is promoted in the advert and make the transition from audience member to consumer.
Through this tension, advertisements are designed to make the audience wonder how they feel about themselves. Thus, it is constructing subjectivity, a sense of self, and how they feel about the world. And the capitalist system that we live in has created this feeling in order to promote the buying of goods in order to relieve this tension. Unfortunately, it is only a temporary fix for this tension as we are bombarded by images everyday of how one should be. Consequently, from this, the society has driven itself into a continuous loop of buying products to produce a feeling of contentment and to obtain the ‘freedom’ of which the products promise (false promises), yet we are never fully satisfied in the end because we will continuously have an urge to buy more at some point because we realize that the specific products that were obtained did not give us the freedom we were told we would have. The capitalism system has created a disciplined culture where we work for a living, and many will keep spending to the point that they need to work increasingly more – and when you work so much where is the freedom?
With women’s rising status and increasing payrolls, they have recently become a large target in the capitalist system that runs advertising. However, men still are the ones who pull the majority of the strings; they are the ones who run the capitalist system. Thus why it is believed that the women’s identity is being subjected to a direct attack, by narrowly defining us as infantile creatures, as sexual beings that must be experienced and always up for it, and by defining us as constantly lesser than men.
Sure women have stepped up in the world, but in advertisements we still are being objectified because the capitalist system wants to put them in their place. Advertisements have created a specific type of femininity that is narrowly defined by sexual agency, not any mention of women’s smarts or holiness, etc. This is known as commodity feminism which we see in ‘Sex and the City’ for example, where women try to express themselves through sexy clothes Manolo Blaniks, and advertising is selling through the guise of this type of femininity. This is how the capitalist system, run by mostly men, tries to appropriate women. Commodity feminism is essentially stripping away the empowerment of feminism. And that’s how our culture likes it.
~ Leon
Reference:
Jhally, S. (n.d.) Advertising, gender, and sex: What’s wrong with a little objectification?Sut Jhally Website. Retrieved June 26, 2011, from http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/whatswrongwithalit/
