Analysis by Owen Hackman
Goldstein, Dina. “SNOWY.” Dina Goldstein, 30 Apr. 2020, www.dinagoldstein.com/dina-goldsteins-fallen-princesses/.
Abstract
The objectification of women within advertising and entertainment has become a culturally acceptable integration into our society today. Authors within the field of advertisements explain that there is increased usage of fairy tales and their motifs within advertisements because they get their message across to a wider variety of people. From a young age, children learn of gender roles through the form of fairy tales that demonstrate the dependence women have on men. The question at hand is: how do fairy tales enable this objectification of women within advertisements and entertainment as culturally acceptable? Through reading or watching fairy tales such as little red riding hood and snow white at a young age, gender roles and the dependence women have on men become engrained in children that allow for a society to see the objectification of women in advertisements and entertainment as culturally acceptable. For the purposes of this project, data analysis and studies conducted on both women and men demonstrate that our society today recognizes the sexualization of women as acceptable. The intervention of the use of fairy tales to demonstrate why this serves as a contribution is because it seeks to explain how they have enabled our society to come to see this as culturally acceptable. This understanding of the importance of fairy tales and stimuli upon a young child will help us alter and change our habits. This is significant because it will look at how the gender roles and constructs depicted within fairy tales create the notion of sexualizing and objectifying women as acceptable within society.
Project 3:
Fairy Tales and Their Impact on Female Objectification in Advertising and Entertainment Within Society
We live in a society today where we are constantly surrounded by many types of advertisements and entertainment. There is no place that a person could go where they would not see a product, movie, or business being advertised in some shape or form. The ways in which advertisements are created are done in such a way to make people want to purchase their product. In particular, advertisements and entertainment today exploit women by objectifying them and sexualizing them. This new era of advertising has become seen as culturally acceptable and normalized by the people within our generation, and society as a whole. This objectification of women did not just happen abruptly where one day there were not any to the next where that is all there was. These new types of advertisements and entertainment were able to be ushered into our society through what they were taught and read as children. Many children watch or read fairy tales at some point in their youth. Fairy tales such as little red riding hood and snow white depict a society where women have this dependence on men and have very specific gender roles. So from a young age, children learn that men are the ones that do all the work and are supposed to provide for the family whereas women are supposed to take care of the house and children. The gender constructs presented within fairy tales like these teach children how society is supposed to look, and these teachings present themselves later in their lives as a result. Through reading or watching fairy tales such as little red riding hood and snow white at a young age, gender roles and the dependence women have on men become engrained in children that allow for a society to see the objectification of women in advertisements and entertainment as culturally acceptable.
Fairy tales like little red riding hood and snow white present gender constructs that demonstrate the dependence women have on men and expected roles within society. It is important to first understand the themes and lessons being learned within these fairy tales by children because it will play a role in how they view the world later on. The fairy tale of snow white demonstrates a patriarchal society where women are expected to only perform certain duties due to the gender constructs of that time. Within the Brothers Grimm version of snow white, Snow White is found by the dwarfs and is allowed to stay “if [she] will keep [the] house for [them], cook, make the beds, wash, sew, knit, and keep everything neat and tidy, then [they’ll] give [her] everything [she] need[s]” (Grimm 137). Snow White is only allowed to stay if she, in a sense, does all of the chores and takes care of the house. It is demonstrated through this that her only self-worth as a woman is being beautiful and to clean and take care of all the housework. These gender roles are very common within fairy tales as they were written in a society where men were the only ones that provided for the family and the women stayed home to take care of the children and house. Another fairy tale that demonstrates female dependence on men is Little Red Riding Hood. The female dependence is demonstrated through how the “huntsman realized that the wolf might have eaten Grandmother and that she could still be saved” (Grimm 47). Through the fact that she needed to be saved by a man, this demonstrates that she was unable to protect herself and keep herself safe. Had the huntsman not saved them, they would not have survived, symbolizing that women in society must be dependent on men in order to protect their well-being. Our society has grown and changed where women today now work and can provide for their families just as the men do. Even with this, these fairy tales are still present and teach children about these gender roles that are not necessarily as true as they once were. These fairy tales instead lead to a society where women are less dependent on men than they once were but are sexualized and objectified within entertainment and advertisements.
Through the incorporation of fairy tales and their themes within media in society today, advertisers can get their message across to a wide variety of people. Fairy tales have become more popular in society today because they are many television shows and movies that incorporate fairy tales into them. Fairy tales are explained to be “part of the collective unconscious [and] are rooted in the fundamental structures of the imagination, and reflect common experiences of human societies, even in the absence of contacts or exchanges among peoples [and because of this] fairy tales represent one of the best ways to reach the widest possible audience” (Carpi 162). Fairy tales are demonstrated to have immense amounts of influence within society because they are so common. Through how fairy tales are “rooted in fundamental structures” and “reflect common experiences” large numbers of people are able to connect with them in some sort of way. Because fairy tales can connect with many different people, the characters, morals, and lessons within them are also able to do the same. Keeping this in mind, the themes and morals within these fairy tales also reach large amounts of people. Due to many of these fairy tales representing women as dependent on men and objectifying them within them, these ideas and constructs have become more prevalent and present themselves in our society today. Additionally, people today do not believe everything that they see in advertisements to be true by any means. With this being said, “the fact that fairy tales are are used [in advertisements] and are generally successful means that they reach and get their message across [making it] seem that people are often ready to accept a message offered through a fairy tale” (Carpi 163). Through the fact that people are more likely to accept a message within an advertisement if it involves fairy tales, this demonstrates that the themes and ideas demonstrated within these fairy tales are also going to be accepted. The concepts of female dependence on men and the objectification and sexualization of women are being constantly perpetuated within society leading to them becoming culturally acceptable. Therefore because of the constant use of fairy tales within media involving advertising and entertainment, this narrative of women’s degradation is constantly being pushed and becoming normalized. This sexualization and degradation of women in media seem to be working as advertisement companies would have shifted to other ideas now if it had proven to be unsuccessful. This high rate of success demonstrates just how influential the constructs presented within fairy tales are and how they have impacted our society.
Within our society today, the current use of women’s objectification in media has no negative impact on the viewers’ consumption habits and perception. During the last several decades, our society has shifted from one where women objectification within media and spoke out against it to one where women see this objectification in media and make a conscious decision to tolerate it. Within a study conducted several decades ago, women believed that they were “treated mainly as sex objects [and that advertsiements] showed them as fundamentally dependent on men and found the portrayal of women in advertising to be offensive… [and concluded that] an offensive advertising campaign would have a negative effect on company image and purchase intention” (Zimmerman 1). As demonstrated within this study, women would stray away from companies and businesses that sexualized and objectified women within their advertising campaigns because society had not yet normalized or saw this as culturally acceptable. This is before the era of when fairy tale characters, themes, and ideas became prevalent in many aspects of our day-to-day life. Fairy tales ushered in the acceptance of women being objectified as something normal, along with some changes in feminism. Within a study conducted several decades later within our society today, “educated women agreed that the specific advertisement viewed in this study uses sex, [and] viewed it as culturally acceptable, were less offended by the portrayal of women in advertising than women in the previous study, [and] will be more likely to maintain an existing positive view of a brand and will be inclined to purchase and use it, regardless of any sexual portrayal of women in that brand’s advertising” (Zimmerman 1). Through these results, we can see that women are being sexualized within advertising and do not alter their consumption habits or image on a business because of it. This demonstrates that women within our society have normalized their objectification and sexualization and has become a rudimentary aspect of media that seems to not be stopping anytime in the near future. Through the increased usage of fairy tale concepts within media, women have become more inclined and susceptible to normalizing something that was not normalized just three decades prior. Fairy tale motifs and concepts have allowed for this new era of media to be normalized, accepted, and encouraged.
Overall, fairy tales have enabled society to normalize the objectification and sexualization of women within advertising and entertainment through their depiction of female dependence on men learned from a young age. These gender roles and constructs learned by children manifest themselves into their adulthood and have enabled media within society to become culturally acceptable when it would have otherwise not. Because fairy tale characters, themes, and ideas surround people today wherever they look, they have become more inclined to believe what is being told or shown to them. Fairy tales provide sentimentality and comfort to people because they read and watched them as children. This comfort has become increasingly exploited to make people view the media involving female objectification in an acceptable manner. It has come to a point where people are not even aware that what they are viewing sexualizes and objectifies women as they have learned that this is a normal aspect of society. Only our society as a whole can decide whether or not we create a change and until then, the same old habits will continue until there is a new era in advertising and entertainment.
Works Cited
Carpi, Daniela. Fairy Tales in the Postmodern World: No Tales for Children. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016.
Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm (a). “Little Red Cap.” The Classic Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.; 1999.
Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm (a). “Snow White.” The Classic Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.; 1999.
Zimmerman, Amanda, and John Dahlberg. “The Sexual Objectification of Women in Advertising: A Contemporary Cultural Perspective.” Journal of Advertising Research, vol. 48, no. 1, 2008, pp. 71–79., doi:10.2501/s0021849908080094.
