The video that was shown in class, titled Killing Us Softly, is a very powerful work that exposes just how cruel the advertising world can be. This world of advertisers is notorious for its horrible depictions of women in the world. Their advertisements are in magazines, newspapers, on buses, billboards, and television. Americans are exposed to about 3,000 ads per day according to the video and I have chosen just one to analyze. This advertisement is one that I saw in a magazine a few days ago, before being assigned this extra credit opportunity.

The advertisement that I am going to be analyzing was found in a Cosmopolitan magazine only a few days ago. The advertisement is for Orbit chewing gum and at first the picture seems rather harmless. However, when you stop to think about what was said in the video shown in class, you may begin to see and think otherwise. As I flipped through the pages of the magazine I found myself stopped because of an enticing advertisement. This ad in particular has a very nice looking woman dressed like a Hawaiian hula dancer who is front and center on the page with only a small portion of beach and ocean behind her. All seems well so far, right? Well, everything would be fine or at least acceptable if things were not so bizarre. The thing that struck me as a little out of the ordinary was that she was not wearing a real bikini top or even a coconut brassiere. The thing that makes this ad so degrading towards women is the fact that this beautiful young lady is wearing two packs of Orbit gum tied to string to cover up her breasts. That is not all. On top of the insult that they would exploit a woman’s breasts to sell chewing gum, they make a poor attempt at witty-humor as well. This is because the flavor of the chewing gum that Orbit and the Wm Wrigley Jr. Company are advertising is “NEW! Orbit Maui Melon Mint”. This is particularly degrading towards women because this girl, as pretty as she may be, is depicted as beautiful, bubble headed, and somewhat as an “easy” sex object. The reason for being so is because she is wearing a fake “bubble gum” bikini top that leaves little to the imagination, a provocative grass skirt that just so happens to be showing a little bit of inner and upper thigh, and because she has a gigantic and welcoming smile along with a look of joy as if she is saying “Hey, I saw you looking at my Maui Melons, so come over and have a piece if you like what you see!” This is just terrible because sex and a woman’s body should be the last thing used to sell, of all things, chewing gum.

I know that this is just a drop in the bucket when comparing all of the other thousands upon thousands of advertisements that use women and their bodies to sell products. In my opinion the Wm Wrigley Company should be ashamed of their selves. This is horrible in the sense that young women are seeing this and many other even worse images on a daily basis, and only to make them think that they aren’t pretty enough, their too fat, too short, too white, too wrinkled, too Everything! Advertisers like this are pushing the untrue fact that “women need to look like supermodels”. I hope that one day, every time a person sees an ad like this they will be outraged at the simple fact that these advertisement are demeaning towards women, as well as men, children and the relationships between men and women.