Iron Maiden

After reading The Iron Maiden: How Advertising Portrays Women, I actually wasn’t too shocked or anything. I knew this was a growing problem because I have seen it before myself. As a young teen I was thrown into the world of magazines and pop culture. The advertisements at first did not depress me, but encouraged me to become more fit and healthy with my life. But as the years went on, I soon came to find that I was never going to look like the models in the ads, and that was depressing. I then became extremely self-conscious of myself, and now looking back I really shouldn’t have been. The advertising world is a cruel and harsh one to live in. Women are idolized as being skinny and beautiful women with perfect hair and flawless skin. This is basically a lie. No one is perfect, well, except for in the pictures, but professionals digitally alter those. The scary thing is, is that young teens are seeing this ads as they keep getting worse, and they feel that they MUST look like that in order to be liked or successful in life. And teens are young adults are now taking looks to the extreme by radical dieting or self induced vomiting. I have come to find out that women come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and that is beautiful, God wouldn’t have made us if he didn’t think we were each beautiful in his creation. The hard thing is that most of society cant seem to grasp that reality and struggle constantly about appearance.
The pictures in the article are also very accustomed to me. There are women being shown half clothed as if they were ornaments. Men are being shown, more times than not, with out t-shirts and with extremely athletic bodies. These pictures are perfect examples of what is WRONG with advertising. Making sex appeal an object that sells is totally wrong when your not even selling sex! Anyways, advertising is garbage when it comes to the well being of society, and I really hate that. :(