From a Girl to a Woman —

Published in

Media Theory and Criticism 2016

4 min readFeb 20, 2016

As a child, I vividly remember seeing images of young, attractive women on television, the internet, and in magazines. They sported revealing clothing selling anything from cologne, to cars, to Coca Cola. I have been conditioned to believe my body is a canvas, a medium for effective media marketing.

Here are just a handful of sexualized ads run in the media cycle:

2015 was a year full of achievements for women. Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Peace prize winner in 2014, gained momentum for her foundation The Malala Fund which helps educate young women around the world, 104 women held seats in the United States Congress, and Emma Watson launched her HeforShe campaign promoting gender equality.

Then why does the media continue to portray female bodies to sell things like cheeseburgers?

Well part of the reason for its persistence is the shear fact that this type of advertising has been around for decades. Sexist advertising really picked up pace and grabbed consumer attention during the 1950s when women typically were stay at home mothers or generally made less money than men during their lifetime. Ideas concerning women and their place (in the home), transformed how media was served to the public.

Advertising moved from strictly sexist ads to incorporating the female form to sell a product in the 1960s and 70s and has persisted to this day. This further degraded women and made their bodies a basic media tool.

Here are ads that ran from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s:

This phenomena can be partially explained by Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. Bandura postulated that children were socialized to think certain behaviors were acceptable by viewing authoritative figures (such as their parents) carry out actions/ideas. Social Learning Theory directly relates to sexist and sexualized media campaigns and advertising. In the early stages of advertising, media companies and consumers of media did not become outraged at the images presented to them but rather accepted and adopted them into their cultural norms.

From this behavior, younger generations have espoused this practice and formally incorporated it into mainstream media. But the softer, animated images of women in the 1940s evolved into much more revealing and demeaning images of women currently portrayed in media.

With this barrage of distorted female images on a daily basis, men and women in society have fallen prey to George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory; which states that long-term media exposure creates a warped view and understanding of reality compared to the subjective portrayal seen in media outlets.

From these two theories, it is fairly easy to see that media and advertising are fairly path-dependent industries. That is to say that the decisions concerning ad campaigns are limited to and determined by the choices made early on in print and television media.

Women across generations have been governed by these images and molded into sexual beings with no purpose and even less to say in these long-running ads.

When I was a girl, I never thought of how my adult self would be altered by these depictions and even less about what they say about my society.

As more people join the conversation about sexualized images in media the less path dependent this trend will become and the sooner the female body will be freed from selling your food, clothes, and entertainment.

Images retrieved from:

All images are licensed for non-commercial uses.

From a Girl to a Woman —

Written by Cailyn Bowen