What are you studying??

Communication studies examines what goes overlooked in everyday life. This often makes it difficult for me when explaining what exactly I'm studying to friends and family. I get a lot of "Ohhh you study advertising. So you want to go into marketing?" and then some "I see. That sounds a lot like sociology, or psychology right?" And after four years, my response is still "Well, um, ya, kinda, but not really". So what are all these loans for then?!?!!

My classes have taken a strong cultural studies approach intermingled with communication technology classes, which, while useful, are much less interesting. I have found myself deeply enjoying classes which look at media, society, and the relationship between the two. We often look at advertising and mainstream cultural content as something to study. It makes sense to examine this rather than Shakespearean sonnets as the public consumes much more low/pop culture than high/classic culture. Andy Ruddock uses a phrase to describe cultural studies as "making the familiar strange".

This is a very important idea. We generally take what we see for granted. Flipping through magazines I know me and my girlfriends (and guy friends when they're not with other guys) look at the ads and critique the dresses, shoes, and overall attractiveness of the model. But we as a group never seem to look deeper than that, while my internal dialogue is running a mile a minute about the portrayal of gender and power relations within the media we are passively consuming. Soooo why am I not voicing this all? I'm not really sure. I have found that many of my friends find it very difficult to look at media in this critical way ( I find this especially true in those focused in on hard sciences). But honestly!! How could we not view this stuff as strange??

Some sample ads

This could read as: I am Alicia Silverstone, and I am a NUDIST!
or, and I got too drunk and woke up by the pool naked
This has nothing to do with vegetarianism and everything to do with sex. But they say food is sexy right? Looks like this girl hasn't seen any sexy food in a while, so maybe that's why she's naked?? Trying to make the salad sexy?

Cruising through the pages of Google images for ads I found a slew
of others that I would like to question.

These two ads I found to be rather disturbing as the women are portrayed as little girls.
Or the little girls are portrayed as women. I'm not really sure which way they're going with this but either way it relates sexual arousal with young girls.

I could go on and on about these and the many others I found but I will spare the redundancy. But before I part with the pictures, let me ask you what the religious right would have to say about the following Natan Diamond commercial.

Ahh!! the sanctity of marriage!!

Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist who believes we both create and consume culture at the same time. This essentially means that in viewing culture, in this case advertisements, we create our own meaning. We consume culture in the sense that we view and then internalize, although we may not consciously be doing this. In terms of the advertising examples, who we are creates a range of possible interpretations. Most who have not studied communication would probably pull out a "whatever, sex sells" opinion of these, while those of us who can, and actively, view these things as strange, can see a myriad of meaning built into a simple picture. It is, after all, worth a thousand words. Hall uses semiotics as a way to draw meaning out of media. In the Natan advertisement, the box with the diamond in it is the signifier. The signified (meaning we glean from the signifier) in the first part is the traditional idea of marriage. The second part, is sex, and a way to get her to spread her legs when she may not have before. Meaning is quickly changed with a simple opening of the box, uncrossing of the legs.

Thinking about the meaning of advertising makes me wonder what is going on in the heads of those creating these ads. Not really much. Most likely, what pretty young thing can I get to up the sales of Science Diet dog food. Maybe if she's eating the dog food, or a guy is walking her? Some tag line having something to do with pure food for your pure bred? or only the best for your bitch? Ok maybe I'm taking this a little too far, but seeing the repetition of objectification makes me rather cynical. It puzzles me that more people don't question this portrayal. For the bigwigs creating the ads this would most likely be career suicide, for women it would just be another feminist rant, and for men, it would be a denial of everything our culture has ingrained in them.

Men are trained within our society to objectify women and women are trained to want to be objects. Media shapes women into thin frail play helpless things. Sadly, I often see girls and young women embodying this portrayal. The power relations between men and women in the media is so obvious yet so unexamined! The more I study it, the more aware I become of it. People often think of the hypodermic needle effect of media. Critics like to say rap music makes men deal drugs or beat women. I disagree with this and rather adhere to a cultural analysis of media content. Ruddock describes this as the role the media plays in shaping dominant ideologies and the way we see ourselves within the world.

The limited scope in which advertising portrays women, especially in relation to men, is very telling of our societal values. While men play power roles in this specific form of media, women appear as dominated, the means of mens sexual pleasure or simply objects of adornment.