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Action Project! Women in Advertisements Emilie Vu
Introduction Dear readers,
The Women's Studies must sound inappropriate to you: why study women at all? Why not study men in the Humanity class? Why no study Blacks, or Hispanics, or Asians? Women's Studies does deal with feminine issues and feminism in the last decades of the century, but it also teaches us human issues like racism, homophobia, violence, sexual abuse, hate crimes, minority's rights, and, inequality. The course focuses on the solutions to those issues, and what can be done to live in an equal society. The purpose of the project was to allow us to learn what activism is. Each group in the class chose a topic and had to educate the population and make people aware of the issue. My group chose Women in Advertisements as the subject. We wanted to change the way women are portrayed in the media: weak, frail, obedient, submissive and sexually available. It is the same for men. The pictures of male model we see in the ads tell us that men have to be dark skin, muscular, hairless, strong and sexually successful. If these images are perpetuated, how can we stop rape, sexual abuse, battery, and murder? Few advertising companies have already changed their commercial concept but there is still work to do. Our action was to get people conscious of women's position in the media. We concentrated on magazine advertisements because we had easy access to them. The following essay is a complete report of the steps we took in the action as well as our own impression on the project. I hope you'll enjoy it as my friends and I did.
Emilie Vu Acknowledgment: I would like to thank the administration of IVC for allowing us to do the action on campus. Thanks to the IVC Women's Center for their help and for framing our poster board. Special thanks to Kathy Bruin from About-Face for her wonderful ideas and support throughout the whole project. Thank you so much for your time and your web site! |
The following project you are going to see is part of a class assignment in the Women's Studies course.
