content=Traditionally the image of woman has been polarized as good and bad, heavenly, and evil, bringing benevolence and compassion, to seducing and entrapping. And the image carries on in advertising today.

.It is true there have been erotic images of women in art for centuries, but mass technology has made it possible for these images to constantly surround us. Unlike art, advertising always yokes these images to products.

The primacy of the visual image has always been outstanding, and women have been influenced by the ideal female image for years. But today, visual images are everywhere and female images more than ever are influenced by business and produced by advertisers. The average person sees over 3000 advertisements a day 3000!  Kellner in his article Advertising Images  writes, .In a postmodern image culture, individuals get their very identity from these figures, thus advertising becomes an important and overlooked mechanism of socialization, as well as manager of consumer demand. 

Advertising promotes products by playing on people s unfulfilled desires and insecurities. Consumers want to be like the person in the model because they associate the way the model looks with the perceived lifestyle the model is leading in the advertisement. For instance, Kellner uses cigarette advertisements to make his point. Marlboro suggests that to be .a real man. one should buy Marlboro cigarettes. And Virginia Slim advertisements sell more than cigarettes too; they sell the concept of thinness to women. In fact, Virginia Slims suggest if women want to be progressive and cool, they need to be slim. As Kellner writes, 

.The image of the slender woman in turn associate with slimness and lightness, not only associates the product with socially desirable traits, but in turn promotes the ideal of slimness s the ideal type of femininity. 

The current hypersexulized climate produces images of women as sex objects more than ever as are the images of women as both evil, benevolent, and a goddess, which is the historical tradition of depicting women.
 
Advertising has contributed to a pornified culture of women objectifying themselves and men placed in dominant power roles. As Dan Aucoin writes in his article .The Pornification of America,. he believes that because of the prevalence of sexualized media and advertisements, young people s perceptions of beauty, sex and relationships have been distorted. He writes,  .the current hypersezualized climate distorts the attitudes of young people toward sex and relationships. In particular, they contend it has a damaging effect on the self-image of young women and girls who are confronted with a culture that objectifies them while disguising it as female empowerment.

The media industry is responsible for the explosion of .soft-porn. images throughout our culture because advertisers believe sex sells
.Advertising magically offers self-transformation and a new identity, associating changes in consumer behavior, fashion, and appearance with metamorphosis into a new person.

Furthermore, advertising is responsible for the influence on girl-culture and its construction of the white, slim, .ideal woman.  The construction of this ideal is so prevalent in our society, that many girls are actually trying to change themselves to become closer to the unobtainable female ideal in ads. Women run the danger being dissatisfied with their bodies because it is hard to fight with the primacy of media images of unrealistic female images. 

Images of women from history intersect with the new hypersexualized ad culture. For instance, the image of the courtly woman is the wealthy, aloof; admired woman who is refined and can help a man move up in society manifests in Capri and Virginia Slim advertisements or even Paris Hiltons image as an heiress to a great fortune.

Bur rarely are women seen as powerful. When they are, they are usually powerful over trivial things.  Young girls are portrayed passively, smiling, looking up at little boys. Young boys are portrayed in ads as active, tough, looking down at girls. This changes when race is in the mix.

This tendency is also a representation of the Virgin Mary like female qualities. Women are supposed to be virginal and sexless. We often see images of young children or adults being infantaliized, this is a form of depicting Virgin Mary attributes. Furthermore, modern advertising often represents women as sweet, innocent, passive, and needing protection. Often women are represented as virginal, yet at the same time supposed to be experienced. This sends a confusing message to young women. 

On the other hand, there are representations of women being an evil and sexual temptress, that advertising takes the Eve motif to a new level. The advertising images are created in a hyper sexualized society and the images reflect that. 

Advertisers often only show parts of the female body, and this production choice further objectifies women because the viewer is forced to look at that part of the female body. When one body part is zoomed in on, then women are objectified even more, a womanıs totality is reduced to this part.  So in these sorts of images women become sex objects who can be used and manipulated. 

The use of sex to sell everything is frightening. It makes sex less and more important than culture way to see it, as Kilbourne suggests. Media makes sex out to be the most and only enjoyable part of life yet trivializes it. Ads do not allow room for sex to be emotional. The present ad culture, places no emphasis on intimacy in a relationship. Actually, the US actually has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in a developed country, maybe because young people are targeted and sex is trivialized.


There is also the use of the image of women in bondage used to sell since pornography has part of the mainstream. There is a slim line between eroticism and violence, a tradition rooted passive and vulnerable. Often ads suggest women want to be dominated, and they create a thin line between seduction and attacks. These images of brutality may be a cause of battering of women, the most common cause of violence on women.
Furthermore, many ads feature women cloning their mouths, being silenced. Their body language is passive, vulnerable, being used. According to Jean Kilbourne, objectifying any group makes them seem inferior, and is the first step towards violence because perpetrators can justify violence against a .thing.  because it lacks humanity.

Images of ultra thin women are everywhere. And because US culture is based on the ideal that if citizens work hard enough they will succeed, women strive to be the unobtainable women in the ads. But ideal beauty is flawless, so failure inevitable. 

Women therefore believe that if they do not look like the ideal, they are not trying hard enough. Therefore, many women go to great lengths to actually transform their bodies. With computer retouching, the ideal is even more perfect. Computers recreate women to look like perfect women. Ad furthermore, today computers can generate a moveable woman. So the ideal is becoming more and more unobtainable. To achieve the thin white and young is the female ideal American women have become obsessed with thinness, and women measure their self-worth by their weight. 1 out of 5 of American women has an eating disorder,  4 out of 5 has disordered eating. 5 percent of American women have the body type of a super model, and the super models are genetically thin, broad shouldered, long legged. And even the super models diet, sometimes are anorexic and often have breast implants. But we only see these women in advertising; we do not see what the 3 billion other women look like.

Women have always been typecasted by men in history and depicted through art. But today advertising is everywhere, and because the same female motifs are wrapped around images of beauty, many women are buying into these ideals. They are going to great lengths to transform themselves and are forgetting that how they look is not the only facet to who they are.