Ever wondered how many times in a day your eyes skim over the words of an advertisement? If you're curious and bored one day, take a quick mental count each time you see or hear an advert trying to sell you something. Think about the stuff you read. If you enjoy your daily paper, or magazine, or just passing time looking at billboards that surround you when you're walking, driving, sitting in the LRT or bus, in the train, on a plane, it can become an endless stream of snappy tag lines that sit familiarly - like an old friend's name - on your mind. The amount of our (sub)consciousness being taken up by processsing messages from the media can be quite mind-boggling. Not only do the adverts sell us their brands, they send us pretty severe messages about the expectations on our personal lives as well. At the very least, advertisements, far from being innocent of social values, actually reflects, agitates, instructs or creates it.

There is something very unethical about reliance on stereotypes to sell a product or brand name, whether the stereotype is sexist, racist, ageist and so on. When an advertisement tells a woman that their product can "scientifically" lighten her skin, cause her to lose weight or get rid of those wrinkles, what it effectively says is that a woman should take extreme care in how she looks. At the same stroke, it also tells her that her worth is inexorably bound to her appearance - the moment she shows any sign of the natural consequences of life and time (i.e. aging, or be born with darker skin pigmentation or having facial expressions), her value as a person will be at risk significantly. The superficial merit of being a woman is one of the most common messages sent by mass media in advertising.

Isn't it strange that at an age where women's diverse roles and contributions to society is being visibilised, that she is constantly bombarded with the message that all that matters is her appearance? It doesn't matter if she's a politician, teacher, multinational company director, secretary, thespian, stewardess, mother, scientist, engineer or Nobel Peace Prize winner, ultimately, she will be valued by how she looks. I'm almost tempted to think that it's a conspiracy. The minute more women have opportunity to have careers with economic independence, capitalism can't wait to get hold of her money by selling her stuff she doesn't really need. This is done through sending message after paralysing message about her inadequacies in terms appearances.

Advertisements can eat away the self esteem of being comfortable with one's own body through its introduction of a million and one mediators - make-up, gym culture, plastic surgery, pills and potions. You need this "solution" is because you're not slim/fair/smooth/stylish enough, and if you don't have these things, you're just not good enough. Advertisements display images of seemingly perfect women as the norm with such incessant regularity that it's small wonder our diversity - which is actually the norm - begin to look hideously abnormal.

Women come in all shapes, colours and sizes. We're fat, thin, tall, short, medium, gangly, muscly, flabby, brown, yellow, pink, hairy and we think and feel. It is impossible for us not to have lines on our faces unless we are robots with no expressions. It is impossible for all of us to be hairless, slim and fair unless we starve ourselves silly hiding in UV-protected boxes equipped with razorblades (now wouldn't that be a convenient way to get rid of women from the public sphere?). The models on the advertisements are employed as models simply because they are "abnormally" constructed within the current cultural code of what counts as beauty. Even then, their image is subjected to hours of heavy make-up, hair blowers, special lighting, computer touch-ups and air brushes. The "ideal norm" is as fake as my 84-year-old grandma's teeth. It's fiction made real.

The insidious thing about these messages is that it affects how we see ourselves and think about relations between one another. When think women's superficial worth counts most, we deny ourselves the reality, diversity and depth of women as human beings. When we swallow it without question, we reinforce and normalise this myth to our mutual detriment. Women will continue to be objectified by men and women alike, and continue to waste a lot of our time, effort and money in attempt to achieve an impossible ideal. Meanwhile, the numbers of aneroxia nervosa cases, plastic surgery, sexual harassment and rape continue to increase. We've become so good at disciplining ourselves that we normalised the thinking of ourselves as objects for visual (and sometimes, sexual) pleasure.

React. The next time an advert tells us to buy something because "we're worth it", is it really telling us that we're worth nothing without it.

Jaclyn Kee
8th February 2004

Fortnightly Column by WAO on Sunday Mail