The Commodification of the Female Body

Dress reformers in England and the United States decried the tight-laced corset in vogue during the 1800s. Amelia Bloomer recommended the more comfortable pantaloons that later bore her name, although the fashion did not survive early ridicule. By the early 1900s both male and female reformers campaigned against female foot binding in China. “Deforming a natural foot . . . is just as abusive as that of binding the waist,” wrote a Chinese American physician in 1909. (Henry, 1994, 179).

When Western feminism revived in the 1960s, activists realized that they attracted their greatest media attention by publicizing women’s bodily confinement.

In 1968 U. S. radical feminists scored their first publicity coup by protesting the Miss America to call attention to the sexual objectification of women. Outside the pageant young women created a symbolic funeral pyre in which they burned “instruments of female torture” such as “high heels, nylons, garter belts, girdles, hair curlers, false eyelashes, makeup, and Playboy and Good Housekeeping magazines.

Women around the world demonstrated against beauty contests, picketing the Miss World pageant in London.

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They also protested the medicalization of the female body. In the Netherlands a group of Dutch feminists bared their stomachs at a convention of gynecologists to reveal the slogan “Boss of Our Own Belly” written there. (Henry, 1994, 180). A broad range of health concerns now mobilize feminists. According to the U. S. Campaign for Women’s Health, diseases that disproportionately affect women include osteoporosis, diabetes, lupus, gallbladder disease, and depression.

In 1993 homicide was one of the top five causes of African American women was almost five times as great as that for all women.

Although AIDS initially affected men, by the late 1980s the end of the century 46 percent of those infected worldwide were female, most of them living in sub-Saharan Africa. In the United States women initially contracted HIV from drug use but increasingly are infected by sexual partners; in Africa and Asia most of the women are infected through sexual contract with husbands or partners.

In South Asia and Africa men who work away from home, such as long-distance truck drivers, have been accustomed to having sex with prostitutes at rest stops. Infected by prostitutes, they then infect their wives, greatly in children in sub-Saharan Africa and almost fifty thousand in South and Southeast Asia were newly infected with HIV. (Feminism and Women’s Studies). There is a changing perspective in the way the female body is being perceived in mass media, primarily in advertising and in publication. Many claim that these images of new women in mass media distort the real perspective of the female body and self-perception.

The kinds of images that are being shown in magazines and commercials have developed an impossible ideal of beautiful women, which results to women developing low self-esteem. This is especially critical for girls in adolescent stage where psychological turmoil is heightened in lieu of the fact that bodily changes are occurring everyday. These kinds of issues about women and the way they perceive their bodies are now at the forefront of many marketing research. The pressure is increasing after a sharp increase in eating disorders for women in recent years.

The kinds of bodies that are projected in mass media are now more and more unattainable, thus creating frustrations for many women (The Changing Ideal). The issue does not end there. There are also concerns regarding the increase in the commodification of the female body. Mass media has created a consumer culture through the use of female body. This paper discusses the issues on how the female body is used in advertising and mass media. The goal is to recognize the factors why the female body is commodified and how the change in the perception of the female body affects females themselves.