1960's Ad Analysis

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The ad from Glamour and Cosmopolitan in the 1960’s is a multi-layered image. At first glance you might not even be able to guess what the ad itself is selling. You may wonder why it was necessary for the model to forgo clothes. Why couldn’t they have gotten the same point across with a fully dressed model? All of these questions went through my mind as well. This ad challenges traditional gender roles for women and uses objectification, the male gaze, production, and representation while doing so. I believe that this ad defines gender by switching traditional gender roles from the 1960’s around. Gender roles are how society expects men and women to behave. In that time the man would typically be the studious one. This ad portrays a woman as reading a stack of books to learn more about “unforgettable” women. This most likely would’ve been a revolutionary concept at the time. The ad also suggests that by buying and wearing this brand of pantyhose you could “become” one of those “unforgettable” women. My ideas of gender are most likely extremely different than the person who…show more content…
Production is pictures that give meaning, and in this case talk the viewer into buying something with ideas that already exist. Representation is pictures that give off ideas that are both negative and positive. To apply to how this ad relates to gender, it uses remarkable women you can read about and then become one yourself, which is the production element. As far as representation is concerned, the ad gives off negative ideas by having a naked woman wearing only pantyhose with a stack of books to cover her. It gives off positive ideas by implying that women should read. Yet the books they should be reading are covering a woman’s naked body. This is extremely frustrating. Fortunately we are able to dissect images such as these with a critical eye, or else we would believe this type of objectification is

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