Introduction
Women began to be widely objectified in the sphere of product and service promotion in the latter part of the twentieth century. For a long time, it was believed that any promo involving a half-naked girl is more effective than neutral commercials or posters. This essay will prove that the sexual objectification of women is incredibly immoral and no longer attracts customers to make purchases.
Women’s Sexuality Exploited in Advertisement
In the image attached to this essay, an image of a woman can be seen in a Victoria’s Secret advertisement. The image is heavily sexualized, according to a male standard of sexuality, and it imposes a set of standards of sexual appearance on women. This was chosen from a collection of sexist images of women that only have a sexual undertone, like in the image in Figure 1 (Lucas 2015). However, the ability of objectifying advertisements to attract new customers remains questionable.
The “sex sells” strategy has become less effective in the current world with both male and female populations. Women were less likely to purchase the products because of their greater unfavorable reactions to both female and male sexualized marketing, according to recent studies (Gramazio et al. 2018). Males responded unfavorably to male sexualization in advertisements, in contrast to women’s neutral advertising, and they did not exhibit any increased product attractiveness or buy intents (Gramazio et al. 2018). Thus, objectification in advertisements is inefficient in its aim to sell products.
Conclusion
To summarize, sexualization in advertisements is, at its core, immoral and inefficient. When women are portrayed sexually, they are reduced to nothing more than sex objects, and the response to these images in commercials only helps to turn off potential customers. So, if large organizations want to boost their earnings, their marketing and advertising divisions may need to alter the way they go about acquiring new clients in order to do so in a way that is more moral and effective.
References
Gramazio, S. Cadinu, M., Guizzo, F., & Carnaghi A. (2018). Does sex really sell? Paradoxical effects of sexualization in advertising on product attractiveness and purchase intentions. Sex Roles, 84, 701–719. Web.
Lukas, S. A. (2015). Sex object. The Gender Ads Project. Web.