"Never Just Pictures" By Susan Bordo

Anandi Ramamurthy has helped us to understand the power details have in an advertisement. An advertisement is never just a picture or a placement of words, it is a powerful piece of work that can be a representation of a gender, race, or class. Depending on how something is presented, an ad can have enough power to somehow relate to a person. Ramamurthy has explained that ads, such as the Liz Taylor ad, often are portrayed certain ways to make a person or an object seem desirable. Due to images, such as diamonds or Liz Taylor, the ad seems very elegant, rich, and beautiful, all of which are things people desire to be. Ramamurthy assists the reader in understanding how powerful certain images can be. In “Never Just Pictures” by Susan Bordo, the reader is brought to the same conclusion on advertising, the power of an image.

At one point in time thicker, healthier, and more normal looking women were considered to have perfect bodies for advertising and in life. Now, if you were to look in a high fashion magazine at the advertisements today, you’d see extremely skinny, sickly looking women with clothing draping on them as though their bodies are hangers to what they’re trying to sell. We currently live in a world where skinny is everything, despite the fact that most woman today are not stick-thin but are curvaceous or have healthy bodies.

In “Never Just Pictures”, Susan Bordo examines the need to be skinny and gives countless examples on how advertisements are made at the expense of women because they change the way women, and people in general, view themselves. Bordo even uses examples on how infomercials and advertisements for diet pills are set out to give us the image that being fat, or anything but skinny, isn’t good. She goes on to say “Children in this culture grow up knowing that you can never be thin enough and that being fat is one of the worst things one can be.” Which proves the point that a single image in an advertisement holds so much power over people. It started off as a change in what models looked like in advertising, grew to be an image of what we should all aspire to be because it is what we all desire, and now it’s something that is almost like a world wide epidemic in cultural mentality.