Gender Representation in Advertising Essay -- Marketing Gender Role

Gender Representation in Advertising The roles of males and females in society have significantly changed, as opposed to the predominant roles in our history. In the modern culture of today, women have begun to break out of the mold that which society has placed her in. This much can’t be said when it comes to modern gender representation in mass media advertising. It can be safe to state that woman are seen as sexual, fragile, exotic—whereas men are portrayed as tough, in control, and aggressive. This trend can be one seen as an inhibitor to the advancement of our culture, because especially for women, it is hard to pull away from the stereotypes that are continuously represented. As examples of the given trend, the following images help to reinforce. As an advertisement for Michael Kors apparel, the first image immediately gives off a sexual energy. The model is presented in a very suggestive pose, with her bare legs spread apart, only wearing a long sleeved tunic. The message to the viewing public is clear—these are the kind of woman that wear this apparel, and if you wish to look like her, buy Michael Kors. As a re-iteration of presented thesis, sexuality and a woman’s body image is manifested throughout the ad. The physical beauty of this individual is the central focus. The following image continues in the line of sex appeal with a makeup ad. A bold caption reads â€Å"Eye Candy†, with the model in a very suggestive position and expression. A question that comes to mind when viewing this image is—who is this ad really geared towards? It would be assumed that a makeup ad would be created to attract females, so why would it need to be sexual? What this ad really attracts is the male eye, and woman realiz... ...wage gap of 77%, with females only making on average of 77% what a male makes. On the other hand, the number of women-owned firms in the United States has doubled in number from 1987 to 1999, according to a study by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners, which is a positive aspect. In light of all this, I believe that if advertisers tried something new by not using sexuality to sell a product, it might turn over a whole new leaf. Works Cited â€Å"U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2005 Annual Social and Economic Supplement.† Infoplease. © 2000–2006 Pearson Education, publishing as Infoplease. 27 Oct. 2006 . Gettings, John, David Johnson, Borgna Brunner, and Chris Frantz. â€Å"Wonder Women Profiles of leading female CEOs and business executives† Infoplease.  © 2000–2006 27

A Separate Peace †Denial of Truth Essay

The novel A Separate Peace focuses mainly around a 17 year old named Gene Forrester and his psychological development. The story is set in a boys boarding school in USA during World War II. There are four main boys in the novel and they all undergo major character changes through the story. One of them goes crazy, and the others experience severe attitude changes. Gene is caught right in the center of these changes. He is very close with all of the other three boys, and thus all of the changes affect him very much. Due to all the tension occurring in this novel because of the war and events going on at the school, there is a lot of denial of truth happening. Three of the four boys mentioned earlier deny the truth at sometime in the story. This denying of truth sometimes ends with the person who committed the fault in a bad condition at the end of the book, and sometimes in good condition. So it can be said that there were both positive and negative results for each of the denials of the truth, but these will be explained more in-depth in the following paragraphs. Although it starts after half the book is finished, one of the major examples of denying the truth in the novel is Finny denying the reality of the war. Though it is disclosed at the end that Finny knew all along about the war, he succeeds, after a little time, in making Gene truly believe in the non-existence of the war (although Gene claims that he did not really believe the story, his behavior around his classmates and his actions say otherwise). The first result we see of this denial is Finny’s confession of his bitterness towards the world because of his loss. This destroys the image we have of Finny as a â€Å"perfect† person because it shows that he blames the world for his accident. It also stuns Gene so much that he begins to do pull-ups, even though he has never done even ten before. With Finny’s verbal help, Gene manages to do thirty. This solidifies the friendship between them. After this moment, Finny decides to take Gene into his confidence and tells him he wanted to go to the 1944 Olympics, but that Gene will have to go instead, and goes on to start training Gene. Finally, after many mornings of hard training, Gene finally â€Å"[finds] his rhythm†. Superficially, it can be said that due to Finny’s ruse about the war, Gene became very athletic. A deeper study shows that the incident is much more meaningful than this. It symbolizes Gene coming into his own. The author writes that Finny â€Å"seemed older that morning? he seemed smaller too. Or perhaps it was only that I, inside the same body, had felt myself all at once grown bigger†. It may also be said that on this morning Finny (a model of athleticism) became part of Gene. So, it can be seen that Finny’s denying the reality of the war was truly one of the more important examples of denial of truth in the novel because it resulted in, among other things, a greater bonding between Finny and Gene and shattered the image of Finny being truly composed and serene. Another example of denial of truth would be Leper. Leper, as is obvious throughout the story, continuously denies reality. He is very often be in his own ? dream world’, and when he isn’t he is shy and hesitant to show his true feelings. This was likely because he was â€Å"difficult not to make fun of†. For example, at the beginning of the book, when he claims Gene’s jump was better than Finny’s and is rebutted by Finny, â€Å"he didn’t argue or refuse. He didn’t back away. He became inanimate†. There are also many examples of his not being conscious of his surroundings. One of them is when Gene is thinking about him when he sees him on his way to clearing railroads. Gene recalls that while most of the boys are listening to the announcements, Leper â€Å"made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of his notebook†. Then, when Gene strolls up to talk to Leper, Leper comments about skiing paths. Someone choosing to ski over helping clear a major railroad in the middle of the greatest war of all time is quite odd. He is not even skiing anywhere in particular, just skiing to see nature. He also disagrees strongly with downhill skiing, because it takes away from viewing nature. He thinks that only nature matters and the entire world is as peaceful and going as slowly as he is. Later on, when Leper is considering joining the army, we see more of this denial of reality. He chooses to join a branch of the army that he once thought â€Å"ruined† skiing. He actually believes that when he enlists he will spend all of his time skiing down slopes. This shows that he does not truly understand the seriousness of the issue. Although the positive points of Leper’s denial of truth are much smaller than the negative ones, they do exist. Due to his denial of truth early on in the book, Leper went partially insane near the end of the book, but it can be seen at many points in the book that Leper finally gained some assertiveness and shed aside his timid personality. The next example of denial of truth is Finny’s denial of the evil in other people. Finny represents the goodness that is in human beings. Because he is so good, he has difficulty understanding how other people can have evil in them. This denial of truth gets him into a sorry state at the end of the book. There is an indication of his truthfulness early on in the book, when Gene comments that â€Å"Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this shocked people then he was surprised†. Finny is the guy who is always calm and nice. He is so surprised when Gene confesses to him that he purposely caused Finny to fall out of the tree that he refuses to even believe Gene, and calls him a â€Å"damn fool†. Even prior to this, when Gene sees Finny in the school infirmary, Finny tells Gene about how he thought that there might have been some foul play up in the tree when he fell, then immediately apologizes to Gene for having that feeling without even waiting for Gene to check the legitimacy of this feeling. Afterwards, on the first day of the actual school year, Finny calls Gene to talk to him. When Gene claims that he was â€Å"crazy† and â€Å"over the falls†, Finny doesn’t refute this, and even goes as far as to apologize once again for thinking that Gene was perfectly serious. With his open, honest nature, Finny cannot truly accept that Gene, who he considers his best friend, pushed him off the tree. Finny’s reluctance here can also be compared to another incident in the book. After hearing about Leper going crazy, Finny says, â€Å"I guess I always knew [about the war], but I didn’t have to admit it†. Finny knows that Gene really had caused the accident, but he refuses to admit it and represses it so much that he literally forgets about it. Thus, when Brinker organizes the trial and it is proven (with evidence from Leper) that Gene did cause him to fall, it devastates Finny, and he rushes out of the Assembly Room, slips on the marble stairs, breaks his leg, and later, dies. However, if Finny had not denied the truth about evil in others and had openly challenged Gene, then the story would be much different, and Gene would not have gone through the serious mental development that he did. The final example of denial of truth in the story is Gene’s reluctance to acknowledge the evil in him. There are many examples in the story other than Gene pushing Finny out of the tree that show the evil in Gene. Gene feels a lot of resentment towards Finny for all the things that Finny gets away with. One of these things is when Finny wears his pink emblem to school classes. He is questioned by â€Å"the sternest of the Summer Session masters, old Mr. Patch-Withers†, but gets away with it. Gene even admits that Finny’s ability to get out of trouble makes him envious, but claims that it is okay to be jealous of a friend, but the next incident proves otherwise. Finny often wears ties to replace belts, but on the day of the term tea makes the mistake of wearing the school tie as a belt. When Mr. Patch-Withers sees this, Gene â€Å"[becomes] unexpectedly excited† because â€Å"[Finny] wasn’t going to get away with it†. When Finny does not get in trouble, Gene is disappointed and says, â€Å"Phineas was going to get away with even this†. Gene’s reluctance to acknowledge the evil in him is proven later in the book when Leper says that Gene â€Å"? always [was] a savage underneath† and Gene kicks the chair out from underneath him. Gene cannot accept the truth. In this way he is similar to Finny, although the reason why is completely different. Because Gene cannot believe that there is evil in him, he tries to tell himself that everybody else is evil and thinks that everyone is out to get him. Because he believes this, when Finny breaks the school swimming record, and refuses to tell anyone or do it officially, Gene says he is â€Å"too good to be true†. This is because Finny’s behavior contradicts Gene’s perception of Finny as having evil in him and it shocks Gene. Another time when Gene’s true viewpoint is shown is when he asks Finny if he would mind if he got the highest mark in the class. Finny replies, with obvious sarcasm, â€Å"I’d kill myself out of jealous envy†, but Gene takes it completely seriously, and hides his true feelings from Finny. Gene even acknowledges that he does not know everything that there is to know about him and that there are still hidden parts of himself. But he says that these parts could contain â€Å"the Sad Sack, the outcast or the coward†. Gene does not mention the possibility of evil in him here or at any other time before Finny’s death. The good and bad points for this denial of truth are very similar to the ones for the previous example. Although Gene does not suffer for his refusal to accept the evil in him, Finny does, but only when he breaks his leg, and not when he dies. All of these people react to their various crises in different ways. For example, Leper â€Å"[emerged] from a protective cloud of vagueness only to meet it? and so give up the struggle absolutely†, while Brinker â€Å"[develops] a careless general resentment against it†. It is interesting to note that all of the examples of denial of truth in the book end with the character in question facing a total attitude change. Leper becomes partially insane and much more assertive. Gene understands his feelings much better and is a changed person. It is like when Finny died some of his serenity entered Gene. Because he denied the war’s existence, Finny caused Gene to stay away from all their other friends (Brinker, Chet, etc. ) and only talk to him. With Finny’s denying evil in other people it is a little bit more complicated. With each successive fall, it was like Finny’s character fell too. For example, after the first fall, the bitterness in Finny was shown and he also knowingly lies to Gene about the war. After the second fall, however, there is a bigger difference. He attempts to hide his pain at the ? trial’, but after falling again, he can no longer mask his anger with Gene, and shows this when Gene comes to visit him in the night. He tries to attack Gene, but cannot get out of his bed to get near him. Finny has ? fallen’ from his state of perfection and is like a normal person. He does show, however, that he still has the ability to forgive when he sees Gene for the last time.

The Scarlet Letter And The Crucible - 1169 Words

Try to imagine being charged with a crime, being placed under arrest and given a fair trial by a jury of your peers. Also imagine that you’re in the 17th century. This drastic time change makes all the difference because of the different ideologies and beliefs of the time period. The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible both take place at a time in our nation’s history that is much studied for its significance. These were times when America was just beginning to become colonized. The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible teach the readers vital information about the time period in which these texts take place. To begin with, The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible relay vital information to the reader about how rule-breakers were considered outcasts in†¦show more content†¦We also see Dimmesdale protecting his reputation when he goes and meets with Hester in secret. He never really wanted anybody to see them together for fear that somebody would make the connection. Another example is seen in The Crucible, in which John Proctor wanted to keep his reputation in check. He had also committed adultery by having an affair with a younger girl. Much like Dimmesdale, Proctor was able to keep it a secret for most of his life. We also see how important John’s reputation was to him when his life was on the line. John Proctor had a decision to make late in the story. He had to choose between his reputation and his life. John chose to be hanged rather than have his confession posted on the church door for all to see (Miller 143). These examples show how much reputations meant to the people of the time period in which these texts take place. Additionally, these texts allow for readers to gain knowledge about how punishments were done publically in order to bring shame upon the guilty party. For example, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester had to wear a scarlet letter â€Å"A† in order to make others aware of her crime (Hawthorne 51). Her scarlet letter †Å"A† displayed her crime of committing adultery. Others put her down because the letter made them aware of her action and caused them to take action avoiding her. There were times, however, that Hester would try to escape the shame caused by her letter. DuringShow MoreRelatedThe Crucible And The Scarlet Letter1130 Words   |  5 Pagespeople in society, there is a certain set of logical unspoken rules that are not written rules. The understanding and following of these rules will allow you to belong in most groups. Unspoken rules are what make a group who they are. The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter both have perfect examples for the relationship between unspoken rules and belonging. Also, these works take place in the 17th century around the same area. This creates almost the same setting for both stories where the unspoken rulesRead MoreThe Crucible And The Scarlet Letter1322 Words   |  6 PagesThe Crucible and The Scarlet Letter have several commodities in common. A ba sic summary of The Crucible is, it’s about a village, Salem, in the 1600’s, wherein witchery is loose and several conflicted souls must be captured, purified, confessed, or hung. The attempt to dispose of all witchcraft was tampered with by citizens of Salem being dishonest and deceitful. Lots of the deception stemmed from the jealousy, vengeance, and other personal vendettas. The Scarlet Letter summarized is that it is aboutRead MoreThe Scarlet Letter And The Crucible821 Words   |  4 Pagesis one that that is both emitted in the Scarlet Letter and The Crucible. Both literary works share similar ideas, but also have quite a few differences. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer, utilizes symbolism for the scarlet letter, to be a symbol of Hester’s shame. The embroidered â€Å"A† on Hester’s bosom symbolizes the sin of adultery which she had committed. Not only was the sign of embarrasment used but also the scaffold had great importance in the Scarlet Letter. The scaffold was used as place of humiliationRead MoreThe Crucible And The Scarlet Letter1337 Words   |  6 PagesThe Crucible and The Scarlet Letter are two literary works that helps to shape themes for generations of inquiry. The books emphasize the themes stated all throughout the deposition of the story. They were also books that spoke about a messages as the social issues were taking place during their time periods known as, ‘The Red Scare’ and ‘Puritan Takeover.’ The two books are especially interesting in the way they display these themes, while going about them differently. The Crucible focuses on theRead MoreThe Crucible And The Scarlet Letter2065 Words   |  9 PagesPuritanism as well. Both Miller and Hawthorne take negative stances against Puritanism. This can be seen in their works The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter. The Scarlet Letter deals with the Puritan intolerance of those who committed a sin. In Hester Prynne’s situat ion, her adultery with Reverend Dimmesdale seemed to have sparked a particular hatred for her within her community. The Crucible deals with the Puritan fight against witchcraft. Many people in the town are accused of being witches and are forcedRead MoreThe Scarlet Letter And The Crucible1502 Words   |  7 PagesThe Scarlet Letter and The Crucible are two stories both set in the early days of the Massachusetts colony. Both of these stories have many similarities between them, including setting, situations, and conflict. The two stories were also very different. The effects of sin on the characters, how they deal with their sin, and the consequences of their actions are different in each story. The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter are different works and although they deal with similar conflicts the consequencesRead MoreComparing the Crucible and the Scarlet Letter1071 Words   |  5 Pagesbooks. Two selections that go into detail about some of the different aspects of the Puritan people are The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, and The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. These two particular writers who wrote of Puritan times conveyed, in their text, the similarities of religion, punishment, and adultery in the Puritan community of 17th century. br brBriefly, The Crucible looks at some the actual historical events of the Salem witch trials. It was witchcraft that the story was setRead MoreThe Scarlet Letter and the Crucible Comparison948 Words   |  4 PagesSkyler Vincent English 2333 Amanda Cuellar April 04, 2012 In The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter, they are both known to be a part of the Puritan religion. The puritans are known to be very strict. Often people are put to cruel punishments for mistakes or sins they had committed. The actions they take to â€Å"punish† a person are extreme. The Puritans act and seem so committed to their religion. The people seem â€Å"Holy† but you never really know what happens behind closed doors. The Puritan religionRead MoreScarlet Letter And The Crucible Comparison732 Words   |  3 PagesThe Comparison of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible Both in the novel The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the play The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, women play an important role in the story. Whether it’s for the good of the town or for the worse is the main difference in the stories. Both take a different view on women, and make them the main driving feature of the story, leading to be an interesting comparison when put side by side. In The Crucible, the women of the storyRead MoreThe Scarlet Letter vs. the Crucible Essay703 Words   |  3 PagesThe edgy tale of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is comparable in many ways to Arthur Miller’s haunting play The Crucible. Both are set in Puritan New England in the 17th century and revolve around the harsh law enforcement of the time. However, The Scarlet Letter tells the story of a woman as she deals with her heavy Puritan punishment, whereas The Crucible follows hysteria as it spreads throughout an entire town. Hester Prynne, the main character of The Scarlet Letter, was found guilty for