Sex, Lies, Advertising by Gloria Steinem

After I read through the article ” Sex,Lies, Advertising” of Gloria Steinem, I ran to the store to buy the Elle magazine which is sold for women. I understood more deeply about Steinem’s criticizes for nowadays women’s magazines. All most content in these magazines are only for advertising. Steinem who is a cofounder for Ms. magazine fight for all women’s magazine. She saidthat these magazines need to be changed with more articles about cars, finances, cooking lessons… which is neccessery for women’s life, it’s not useless advertisings. “Goodbye to cigarette ads where poems should be

Goodbye to celebrity cover and too little space
Goodbye to cleaning up language so Ms.advertisers won’t be boycotted by the Moral Majority In fact, goodbye to advertisers and the Moral Majority
Goodbye to short articles and short thinking
Goodbye to “post-feminism” from peope who never say “post democracy”
Goodbye to national boundaries and hello to the world
Welcome to the magazine of the post patriarchal age
The turn of the century is our turn” (249)
As a reader, I also agree with Steinem’s ideas.

Nowadays, in society,advertising is very important for all the people. It’s a way of getting a message across to a vast number of people.Advertising is used to sell or promote a product so people can hear and see it everywhere: in the mall,in the store, on the TV, on the radio, on the street and not exception on the magazines. Although advertising is important , it doesnt mean that it has to be on everywhere. Based on what I saw on the Elle magazine, almost eighty percentage is for advertsing includes fashion, skin care,cosmestic and the rest is articles. However, those articles are also about beauty such as how to make up, how to take care skin…I wonder that why they can use too many space for advertising while they dont use those spaces for more useful things which women is neccesary for life . Elle magazine has four hundreds and ninty four pages but over four hundreds is for advertisement.I dont think i could use “read” words for magazine anymore, i should use ” see” word because there is nothing to read.

After reading and understanding the article ” Sex, Lies, Advertising” and the Elle magazine, I understand that why Steinem wanted the women magazines are changed only because all contents in it are not real. Those magazines attract people buy it by cover outside.For example, all outfits in these magazine are worn by model, normal people can’t wear it for working or going out, it’s just used to promote for that brand name. Names of outfit company in those magazines are luxury names at all, how many normal people can buy those clothes, assessories by avearge labor salary.Furthermore, advertising in magazine use one type of person to represent for one type of people. In fact, it’s not like what is in advertising, it’s only what everyone and everything symbolies.Normally, they use a tall beautiful supermodel to represent all the women because that is what society considers beauty.Like in the CoverGirl advertising, they use famous actress Kate Willest who a thousand of women in the world aspire to looking like even though she is far beyond league with average of women.They are trying to tell us that if we buy CoverGirl cosmetic, we will look beautiful as Kate Willest.

We can see that all content in magazine focus too much on beauty which modern women dont really need.There are more many things that also speak up women’s beauty such as car, finance. Beauty and attraction of women is not only solf,womanisn but also independent, powerful. Women nowadays are also successful like men. Also, another thing which need to be mentioned is equality among people and people in general, and between woman and men in particular. As I mentioned above, advetisers usually use tall,geogeous,beautiful women or handsome men for their business,this technique does work out but we rarely see ethnic women who advertise a beauty product regardless of her beauty. Coloured people are often put down in advertising due to the stereo types shown in the advertising.For intances, all supermodels in women’s magazine are all white people.Disable are never usedin advertising to promote any product, the only times I have been seen them being used is when a charity advertises for donations.

According to the article, equality between man and woman is the same so modern women also have the right to use things which men use such as car, cigarret.” For one thing, publishing ads only for gender-neutral products would give the impression that womem have to become”like men ” in order to succeed (an impression that Ms. ad pages sometimes did give when we were still in the first stage” ( Steinem 255) In womem’s magazine, car, CVRs, or technology advertising which always have in men’s magazine never present.Why it is could be? because women can’t drive cars or can’t afford to buy a computer or any science technology. In addition, in men’s magazine, food advertisings is just images of food which advertisers want to promote but in women’s magazine,it’s contrary.

Food advertisings always come with recipes below image.It means women always are the peopl who have to serve for men, men just enjoy the food.It’s totally not right with modern life at all. As a potential reader of such a magazine, i also have same ideas with Steinem. People spend money just want to buy something useful which helps their life more better, people can’t learn anything from valueless images.People should learn things more realistic which we can apply for life. People are living in modern life,so women also know,do,understand like what men does.Also, in women’s magazine should divide fifty percentage for advertising and fifty for valuale articles such as poems, health items,aticles about how success women in family and in society.Maybe it’s not attractive like those goegeous magazines but it worths.Women can understand more about life.Real things always last long.