Women in the Visual Media

How Do we as Women view ourselves in the visual Media?

Although throughout history women have  been sexually objectified, now more than before young girls are equating their worth  with their body image, and with the advent of the social media, and more so visual media, not only are women being seen as objects , nowadays it is often the image of a woman’s body that can be the driving force behind many a  decision that is made, its usually the Alcohol  label with the most scantly clad ladies , the magazine with the beautiful woman on the cover, the movie with the hot new actress that usually generate the most consumer interest.

“They have ads of how you should dress and what you should look like and this and that, and then they say, 'but respect people for what they choose to be like.' Okay, so which do we do first?" 

Kelsey, 16, quoted in Girl Talk

From an early age our young girls are taught that they don’t have to worry about their looks, that beauty is only skin deep, but more than ever before young girls are being  bombarded with images, mainly from the media that tell them differently, many young girls now want to  look  and dress  like reality TV stars,  movie stars and music icons many of whom offer little or no moral  ethic,  young girls s are particularly vulnerable because they are impressionable  which makes them primary targets of advertisers. Most young girls fail to grasp that they are being targeted and  pressured into accepting social concepts which may have no real truth to them but are being incessantly  pushed on them by the media.  

In 2011, images of 10-year-old Thylane Loubry Blondeau appearing in French Voguemagazine fuelled debate amongst child development experts and government on what restrictions should be made relating to sexualisation of children in the media. 

link: http://mediasmarts.ca/gender-representation/women-and-girls/media-and-girls

        A question arises, are we as women becoming what the media made us, have we become so gullible that we are willing to accept anything form of media content shoved at us with out firstly questioning the motives of advertisers, many of them being women themselves, having a hand in the way in which women are depicted in magazines, commercials, TV shows, movies, music.