Beauty and the beast: images of women in advertisements

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BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: IMAGES OF WOMEN IN ADVERTISMENTS (Esther H. Kuntjara)
Jurusan Desain Komunikasi Visual, Fakultas Seni dan Desain –Universitas Kristen Petra
http://puslit.petra.ac.id/journals/design/
97
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST:
IMAGES OF WOMEN IN ADVERTISEMENTS
Esther H. Kuntjara
Faculty of Letters Petra Christian University
ABSTRACT
Images in advertisements have power to shape our perception on the way we look at the
world. Women in ads are often portrayed as sexual objects. Conventional beauty is women’s
attribute. Unfortunately, the images of women most ads portray are usually the creation of
artificiality that establishes an impossible standard of physical perfection for women This article
presents some different ads from some famous women’s magazines and discusses some possible
meanings the viewers may perceive from the images.
Keywords:
images, women, advertisement.
INTRODUCTION
Every day we move through a visual world of advertisements and newspapers,
photographs and magazines, cinema and television, websites and internet: an optical
empire that is regularly criticized for its power to shape our lives. This visual collage,
accompanying us from morning to night, is a product of the giant forces of the
contemporary world. The power of the images that these processes have produced is
inescapable. They are a part of daily vision, contributing to the way we look at and
understand our world.
We continually select images and it is very often the image more than the written
text that carries most of the message. Most of us are so accustomed to this world of
images that we read most of what we see without much thought. Rutledge (in Fox 1994)
wrote that “images not only shape what we know, they affect our behavior as well. They
drive us to buy, to vote, to protest, to join, to dislike, to admire, to desire” (p. 206). She
also argued that professionals in media business influence people’s behavior and
perceptions with illusions they create. They distort reality in trying to impress their views
upon them.
Kilbourne (1999) noted that advertising is an over $ 100 billion a year industry
and it affects all of us throughout our lives. We are each exposed to over two thousand

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NIRMANA Vol. 3, No. 2, Juli 2001: 97 - 106
Jurusan Desain Komunikasi Visual, Fakultas Seni dan Desain –Universitas Kristen Petra
http://puslit.petra.ac.id/journals/design/
98
ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful educational force in society. The ads
sell more than products. They sell values, images and concept of success and worth, love
and sexuality, popularity and normalcy, addictions. They tell us who we are and who we
should be. The success of a work of art, Karl (1994) maintained, “is often judged on the
basis of its capacity to create in the mind of the viewer or reader a feeling of plausibility,
if not outright believability” (p. 199).
Advertisements have long been recognized of substituting images of desire for the
actual products. “Lux” soap ads, for example, do not only sell soap. They sell images of
glamor, or popularity, or of sheer celebrity, promising a gratifying association with the
likes of Nadia Hutagalung, Tamara Blezinsky, or Bella Saphira, if you will only use
“Lux”, the soap of famous stars. By substituting desirable images for concrete needs,
modern advertising seeks to transform desire into necessity. In many ads, products were
made to appear not only desirable but absolutely necessary. Without them, our very
survival as a socially competent being would be in question. Other ads prey on our
insecurities and fears. deodorants, for instance, are pitched in such a fashion, playing
upon our fear of smelling bad in public.