Advertising does influence people, which is why newspapers and magazines engage in cutthroat competition to convince corporations to place ads in their publications. What appears in these ads are images that equate emotional well-being with material acquisition and encourage women -- beginning in their teenage years and perhaps even before -- to work at preserving the one ôrightö look, one that emphasizes thinness except for in the area of breasts, which should always be voluptuous and lips, which should always be full and pouty (Kilbourne, 1995, p. 21).
The average American views three thousand ads in one day. Yet remarkably, most of us believe we are not influenced by advertising. Advertisers do far more than influence our taste -- they manipulate our desires so that their products will become our closest friends and the images that they project of the most desirable look will become our internalized image of who we should be.
The power and ubiquity of advertising is important in regards to eating disorders and women's bodies because it is through the images that we see in ads that many of us become most aware of what cultural ideals are for our bodies. The people we know and those we see around us everyday are unlikely to have perfect bodies because few (and arguably no) people do have perfect bodies. If we based our ideas of what women should look like on the women that we know (even given the constant messages to be thin that girls and women receive through other channels) then we would have a good chance at having healthy self-images. But the world of advertising offers up an entire universe of unhealthy images for us as women to absorb and internalize (Kilbourne, 1995, p. 37).
A glance through any of the glossy women's magazines like Vogue, Mademoiselle, or Seventeen shows exactly how powerful advertising images are in terms of enforcing ideas about the importance of slimness. A look at this month's offerings of those...