Week 9 - Beauty in the Media

Week 9
Fara Suiza
ASA141
May 25, 2019

In this week's reading, "Race and Beauty", Frith, Cheng, and Shaw look into how Western women are depicted in media advertising versus how Asian women are depicted. The overall idea revolves around how Western women are shown as "liberated" and "free" when they are shown in advertisements using sex as the main allure for appeal, whereas Asian women are often advertised the complete opposite as "cute" and "girlish" (p. 59). This is further expanded upon when talking about the general types of advertisements these women are featured in. For Western/European women, they tend to do a lot of advertisements that revolve around their actual bodies (i.e. sensual poses, advertising clothes, anything to show the body). Asian women, on the other hand, do a lot of advertisements concerning facial beauty (i.e. skincare). This is backed up by data that showed Western women tend to do plastic surgery to their bodies while Asian women do plastic surgeries to their face.

After reading this research article, I feel as though Western and Asian women are not entirely different in how they are depicted. Although Western women are advertised as sexy and alluring in a more explicit manner, I feel as though Asian women are also advertised as objects of desire but in a much different way. In both circumstances, women are being objectified to fit the fantasies of men. Women's progressive ownership of their bodies in the west is often twisted by advertisement companies as a tool to market to male audiences and for other females to aspire as. In Asia, if girls are depicted as cute and girly, it reflects the sexist desire of men who want women to be submissive and easily influenced by a stronger figure. All in all, the way women are advertised across different races may vary depending on the culture they are marketing towards, but the core idea that they are objects of someone else's vision remains true.

For example, Memoirs of a Geisha is a widely criticized novel that over-sexualized Japanese geisha women.... and it was written by a WHITE man who did very little research. This is an example of the "innocent" Asian woman that men might find attractive due to her submissiveness.