Advertising and Social Control

I think it's amazing how much power lies in the hands of advertisers. If it can be said that corporations have financial control of this country, then their respective advertisers have social-psychological control. Advertisements do more, I think, than most people realize to alter the image of beauty in our society, among other things. If you look through any popular magazine, you'll find the pages strewn with images of thin, curvaceous women with hair that could only shine so brightly under hot, carefully placed lighting, and skin that can only be as flawless as it appears under layers of make-up and spray-on tanning. The men on these pages are always buff and unusually well groomed, and everyone tends to exhibit unnatural levels of positive emotion. The same tends to be true for television. You can see it in clothing commercials, make-up commercials, weight-loss program ads, soap and shampoo ads, and even in ads for products that have nothing at all to do with physical appearance, like food or attractions.

Of course, the average person must realize somewhere deep down that these images are by no means true to life, but more towards the surface, there tends to be a desire to be like the people you see, to have beautiful hair and flawless skin, or a buff body, and to be as happy as the people in the pictures or on TV seem to be. The "logic" behind these advertisements is that if people see attractive, "beautiful", happy people using these products, they'll feel good about the product in question and want to use it themselves. there will almost be a subconcious belief somewhere in the mind that using Dove conditioner will give you that unnaturally shiny hair, wearing a Playtex bra will give you that supermodel body you think you need to be as happy as the model on TV seems to be, and that Axe body spray is all a man needs to get a harem of women drooling over him.

In this sense, I think I'm lucky to be blind. I never wear make-up, own very few brand-name clothes, and have never put product in my hair that will glue it in place or make it be the end of the world if it gets wet, and I think a lot of this is because I'm not constantly bombarded with images of how the advertisers believe women need to look to be happy. I do have brand preferences for certain products, and some of these preferences are common, but I think a lot more of my product choices are made based on what the product actually does for me, not what the commercial implies it will do. I used Clean&Clear products all through high school, for example, but I'd never seen a commercial for the product and only learned through hearsay how clean, happy, and pretty the girls in these ads look, supposedly as a result of the product. I just used it because it worked better than alternatives and was in my budget range.