The negative image of women in advertisements : sex objects

Abstract

The following dissertation is basically a study on the negative portrayal of women in advertisements as depicted on magazines. The idea is to show how women are used as sex objects to portray a message and to persuade the public into buying a product. I validated my study by showing that adverts are not what they seem to be and that by making a textual analysis of an advert, one would realise that most messages are not as innocuous as they seem to be and tend to degrade women and use them as objects. After explaining clearly the meaning of advertising, I skimmed through the years and the changing adverts on women from the 1920s onwards. Research was done regarding the adverts portraying women today and the different synonyms associated with them. Furthermore a semiotic study of today's magazine adverts was made through focus groups in order to strengthen my implications, together with a personal study of the context and strengthened by several literature reviews.