Woman as
the Sex Object
Everywhere that you look, you see women being depicted as sex objects. All across north America there are billboards, bus stop advertisements, magazine advertisements and television commercials showing off the female body. Men stop dead in their tracks when a beautiful woman walks by. Why you may ask? It is because Man is physically attracted to Woman’s body. Advertisements of all kinds use the image of Woman’s body and its association with sex to sell their products.
Many women conform to this ideal and inadvertently support the stereotype of women as sex objects. But, Woman is only considered to be sexy if she is young, thin, carefully polished and groomed, made-up, sprayed and scented [18]. In advertising, only young sexy people have sex. It is about a constant state of desire and arousal, not intimacy, fidelity or commitment[18]. In these ads, the people are not sexy because of anything unique to them, but because of the jeans, perfumes, or cars that they’re in. This ideal becomes ingrained into the behavior of women. Subconsciously she believes that to be sexy she must buy and wear these products [18].
Woman is exploited in these advertisements. by being depicted as a sex object. Man sees woman as simply sex or absolute sex [22]. This is an objectification of woman, she becomes an inanimate object with no feelings, no personality and certainly no rights to her own body. Women in pornography are usually shown as objects in their pieces. I would be naïve to say that all men treat women in this manor, but it cannot be ignored that certain men do fell this way. Many women seem to conform to this norm by the way that she dresses. A woman wears a mini-skirt in the name of "fashion". All day long she is fidgeting ensuring that her knees are together so that she does not flash her panties, she is forever adjusting her hem- line so that the skirt doesn’t ride too embarrassingly high, and she is always being careful when she bends over. Yet she continues to wear these skirts because society supports the idea that women are sex objects.