How Women Are Portrayed By The Media

There is one theme being discussed now more than ever: the role of female beauty in advertising. Glamorous, thin, mostly white and perfectly-shaped females posing for magazines, smiling through billboards, gazing from store posters and modelling at fashion shows. Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Megan Fox, Gisele Bündchen, Heidi Klum… the list goes on and on. For centuries, women have been portrayed according to strict beauty standards, which were sadly established by the media itself. “How are we going to sell our beauty products?”, they asked themselves. “Well, we’ll have to create a demand — so let’s convince women that they’re always lacking something: glowy hair, smooth skin, a young complexion, skinny thighs, a perfectly round and cellulite-free bum…”. Anything to sell, right?

You can guess the result of that: still to this day, women feel like they have to achieve a certain standard to be considered beautiful and worthy of appreciation. Unfortunately, it’s not just them who feel this way about their looks: many men learned to think that way about women too. No wonder most girls grow up with a lot of insecurities and mostly tying their values to their appearance. To sum up, the feminists of our era have brought the following to our attention: women are held up to an unachievable beauty standard. And yes, that has a lot to do with how they are advertised — it influences not only the perception they have of themselves, but also how much they are able to love and accept themselves for who they are. Advertisers hold a lot more responsibility than we thought, huh?

So, what could we do about it now? Well, Dove came up with a great idea to start shifting this current societal paradigm: a campaign portraying women of all colors, types and sizes. That means they show how real women look like and that it’s ok to be proud of natural beauty. You can surely question Dove’s motives behind this campaign, but of that I’m sure: it helped improving women’s self-image. As a result, self-acceptance and body positivity can slowly slide into our minds and hopefully, in the future, become the new “normal” way of thinking in our society. We don’t have to look like Kylie Jenner to be beautiful and unique. In the end, why would we want to look like anybody else?

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