For the majority of my life, i have believed that skinny = beautiful. This is because of how the media portrays what women should look like. And for some sick reason, women actually believe these ads. For example, a few of PETA's ads for getting people to turn to vegetarianism revolve solely around losing weight. And in order to lose weight, apparently one must become a vegetarian. This is not the kind of message that young women should be receiving. It is ads like these that really make an impact on women's lives. And not necessarily in a good way. Growing up with all of this hype about the importance of being thin impacted my life in a negative way. Seeing that I could only really be happy if I was skinny, I truly believed it and wanted nothing more than to be skinny. Other ads as well, for other companies, send out the same message. Sometimes with no words at all. Just an image. Like this Ralph Lauren ad, there are no words, and yet it says so much. The woman is thin and beautiful, and the man is also fit and attractive. What I got from this ad is that in wearing this perfume, I would be thin and beautiful and could possibly look like this and snag a hot dude. Which is just an ad scheme to get people to buy their product. Which you would think is a harmless way to make money. But it is seeing these ads with images of beautiful people that send subliminal messages to women everywhere that this is what you should look like.
Of course, not ALL companies are like this. What with the increasing amount of eating disorders and extreme dieting seen in women, companies like Dove and Seventeen Magazine are campaigning to put REAL women on their covers and in their ads. They want to show people that the emaciated girl hugging the extremely good looking man is not what the majority of real girls look like. Through this campaign, hopefully it will send inspiration to girls to accept themselves as they are, and to not hate themselves for not looking like a Victoria's Secret model. I am absolutely in love with this ad campaign, because it's what I am hoping is a turning point in social media. A picture paints a thousand words, so companies should be careful with what they put out there, because it could change someone's life, for good OR for bad.
