Assignment Takeaway #4
The requirements for this assignment were that we find 6 or more advertisement images of men and women in North American and another culture of our choosing. We were then asked to write about how the genders were represented in the images, then to compare and contrast North America’s advertisement to the culture of my choosing. The culture I chose for this assignment was the islamic culture. I chose this specific culture because of prior assumptions I had. The assumptions I had were that women would be more conservative in the islamic cultures advertisements compared to the women in North America’s advertisements. After doing some research I found this to be true as all the women I found in islamic advertisements were wearing hijabs and fully covered.
This assignment really made me reflect on another assignment I did for my psychology of women’s course. The assignment was based on stereotypes of genders within the media. This assignment made me reflect on this other assignment because the advertisements I found in North America stereotyped the men as dominant over females and it stereotyped the woman by sexualizing them. These are both typical media stereotypes that I learned about in my psychology of women’s course. I think that this assignment has affected me personally as a woman because as the media continues to sexualize women, women are being more sexualized in the real world. Introducing this idea of sexualization through the media is desensitizing children to the women’s body at such a young age. I believe this is why we see young girls wearing smaller and smaller clothes every year. I also believe that this is why the average age an individual has sexual inercourse continues to get younger.
