Sexualizing
Women
Day by day our world is
becoming more and more sexually explicit. We in India though not very
comfortable talking about sex yet we want things to get messy. It’s a fact that
we voice are opinion about the injustice that women face yet we want to have fun.
The way women
are portrayed in media does not speak well of our mentality. We are
objectifying women by the way they are portrayed. Mostly, in ads, we see women
touching, caressing, objectified, lying on the floor, body contorted, dressed
like a child, sitting on a bed or chair, eyes closed, not alert, confused,
holding an object or a man for support, sexy and sexually available, playful,
careless and the list goes on. Most of the positions or behavior are either
seductive or show vulnerability. These are positions of submissiveness and
powerlessness. This can be clearly seen when women are shown lying on the
floor, as men stand over them, literally depicting them as commodities and
giving the impression that female bodies are quite plainly ‘prepared for consumption’.
Feminity, in
advertising is not only used as a ploy of sexual appeal, but also in keeping
with societal norms of how women are “supposed to look”. The ideal
female is white, thin, sexily clad, tall, with ‘tubular’ body, blonde
hair and above all, submissive. When a girl sees this and finds that she does
not meet the expectation, there are chances of developing frustration, stress,
low self-esteem, identity crises and other psychological problems. This can also
make the women believe in ads and she may start buying the products just to
look like the models, leading to consumerism. We often hear that sex sell; most
of the time what they really mean is that sexy women sell. For scores of years,
advertisers have been finding different ways to feature women in ads in order to
entice buyers. The way women have been portrayed in media
has changed over the decades, and changed the way society views women because
of it. Images in the media today project an unrealistic and even dangerous standard
of feminine beauty that can have a powerful influence on the way women view
themselves. Women become sexual objects when their bodies and
their sexuality are linked to products that are bought and sold. We also see
that women’s
bodies are often dismembered into legs, breasts, hips or thighs,
reinforcing the message that women are objects rather than o whole human being.
“Beauty is in the eyes
of the beholder”. This is a famous quote we hear over
and over again. The question we have to ask is who feeds the views of the
beholder? What we see over and over again makes an impression on our mind and
we tend to think that, that which is shown is beautiful. We need to be critical
about what we see, or rather, we need to be critical of what the media wants us
to see. It is publicized because we enjoy seeing, without our support there
would not have been sexually provocative advertisements on women. Another question
that arises is “why are women degrading themselves?” everyone has their own
reasons, some for money, some are forced or some others may take pleasure in
such cheap type of publicity.
The way women are
portrayed in the media is one of the major reasons for social evils like rape,
eve teasing, harassment, abuse and other such evils that take place against women.
Women
like men are fully human thus we need to respect them and treat them like human
beings and not as entertainment or inferior beings who are born just to satisfy
men. There is awareness about equality of women and stuff like that. But the
change will happen only when we personally take steps towards improvement of
the situation. We need to stop encouraging and watching things that degrade
women and treat them as objects. When we watch or circulate such things the
demand increases thus the makers make more and more women to such stuff just to
satisfy the viewer.
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