Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore the Indonesian youth audiences’ reaction to objectification in Carl’s Jr American TV ads. In the ads, white women become the focus of the ads and represent the product as a way to promote Carl’s Jr. The study aims at examining the representation of women in the ads from the audiences’ eyes and the audiences’ reaction to the objectification. Moreover, Frederickson & Robert's Objectification theory serves as the theoretical framework upon which women objectification is examined within the feminism and cultural contexts. The result of this study reveals that the audiences think the white women in the ads are being sexualized and objectified as the product that is being promoted. Furthermore, the audiences also think the women’s existences are reduced as a commodity to lure in male customers and increase the products’ sales. Some of the audiences think there is nothing wrong with the ads, some are neutral with it, while the rest wants the ads to be stopped.Keywords: Women objectification, audience reception.
Highlights
The representation of women as sexual objects is seen in real life, but it has been found in various media, including ads
The Indonesian youth audiences’ opinion on women objectification and their reactions are the focal points of this study
The application of Frederickson & Barbara’s (1997) theory in the study of the ads has provided a chance to explore some of the dimensions of the theory itself along with the chance to study the youth audiences’ reception to the women objectification in the media
Summary
The representation of women as sexual objects is seen in real life, but it has been found in various media, including ads. From the ads that we watched, most of its content is absorbed by our unconscious mind, getting exposed to those kinds of ads will influence our mind to think women as an object (Kilbourne, 2010). As this paper will demonstrate, the writer argues that youth audiences perceive Carl’s Jr ads as sexualizing women and objectify their bodies as the representation of the food. Youth audiences demonstrate various responses to the objectification, some of them got dominant reading, negotiated reading, and the rest oppositional reading. Those are borrowed from Hall's theory of reception. The ads are American TV ads, a fair amount of Indonesian middle to upper class have access to TV
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