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The Naked Truth

A young girl is being harassed by a guy on a motorcycle. A shipwrecked man is trying to trade bananas for sex. Another young girl is in the woods surrounded by shiny diamonds, wearing a skimpy dress revealing almost everything, from legs to breast. The list goes on and on by what seems to be a scene from a movie, scenes that have been used too often, it's hard to believe that this time you won't see it in the following feature attractions at a theater near you. Sounds like an advertisement? Maybe because you can see it from Harper's Bazaar magazine showcasing collections from eluxury.com and diamond.com (35, 94,95).

The vast majority of pictures in the magazine are so alarmingly real that it makes me wonder how far the advertisement world is willing to go just to sell their products. Kilbourne, in her essay "Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt," says sex in advertising degrades people, especially women to the point where it becomes pornographic. She adds that pornography violates women on their innocence, beauty, and sexuality (456).

True, the magazine is meant to entertain women in their thirties, but the fact is, the magazine can be freely accessible to children as well. A child can easily flip through the magazine and see a woman on page 56, completely naked, except for the silver heels and diamond jewelry that make up her ensemble. The woman is lying down in an awkward position, one hand covering one breast, and looks entirely pale except for her provocative hooker make-up.

Why is the woman bare? Because the naked truth is: Advertisements use sex to sell their products degrading women in the process.

It is sad to realize that a lot of us patronize these advertisements and don't even know it. We blindly browse though these fashion magazines without consciously knowing what's really in front of us. Sure, the woman on page 56 is naked, but do we really acknowledge the fact that she is literally lying there butt naked and completely vulnerable? The advertisers used her as a thing bonded by an agreement on a piece of paper, a contract that spells out her limitations and clause, and the advertiser's right to use her photograph at any extent. As long as she gets paid, she becomes property and they can do anything to her photographed nakedness. Kilbourne says turning a person into a thing is almost like justifying violence against that person (463). And that if the person becomes an object, violence is inevitable (464).

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