Never Just Pictures by Susan Bordo

In the article, Never Just Pictures, by Susan Bordo, advertisements are discussed as what they want to portray to the society. The women showed in ads are so skinny and every woman is starving herself so that she can look as beautiful as the women in these ads. However, there is a catch; these women are not so pretty, it is more that they have the bodies that attract everyone to look at their ad, but the women themselves don’t have particularly pretty faces. This message tells society that it’s okay to be ugly as long as you’re skinny. Another example in the Bordo article is a picture that shows a woman before she lost weight, and then the after picture. The shocking fact about this ad is that the woman before is not even heavy. This shows that society will make women who are a size eight seem fat just so that they’ll be unhappy with themselves and always want to be skinner and skinner. These ads are showing that it is desirable and beautiful to look dead and that is now what women, and even young girls want to look like.
Ramamurthy discusses how advertising can make an object seem desirable. In this article, Bordo discusses how women are the desirable objects in advertising. If they appear to look good in their clothes because they are super skinny that will attract people to their advertisements and make them want to look skinny as well. Ramamurthy also discusses how advertising can really get into a persons head, possibly without them even knowing it. The advertisers use women in this sense and degrade them in the way they convince women that it’s not okay to be more than a size two. Every ad is a subliminal message to women to become skinnier whether by T.V, newspaper or article.