Ads, culture, and consumerism

After reading the Steinberg article this week, Barbie: The Bitch Still Has Everything, and discussing it in groups I took a new understanding from the article.  At first I believed it to be a feminist approach but after watching, Killing Us Softly, and reviewing the article I noticed that it was more about how the ideal of the “perfect women” is more about consumerism.  As a little girl, I absolutely adored Barbie and of course I didn’t have just one.  I also remember throwing tantrums if my parents didn’t buy me the latest accessory for Barbie.  This follows along with the idea that Jean Kilbourne says in the video, that ads that use sex, like Barbie, are not trying to sell sex but instead use this to make us feel insecure about ourselves to get us to buy more things.  This process begins at childhood, for example through the use of Barbie, and is constantly reinforced through out our lives.  This images of sexuality and the “perfect women”, I would argue varies from culture to culture.  What one culture deems beautiful, another culture might see it as ugly.  However, with the global influence that the American culture has around the world, the new danger is having these images of beauty instilled on a global scale.  This has already happened in a short amount of time.  For example, I can remember watching Spanish language television and seeing dark skinned women, which in U.S. culture would be classified as “curvy”, but in the Latin culture this was the deemed as beautiful.  Now Latin media is changing by trying to imitate U.S. culture and by doing so they are also changing the meaning of beauty. Another example of this that was shown in both U.S. and Latin media is the extreme change that baseball player, Sammy Sosa, went through to become more “attractive”.  He dramatically lightened the color of his skin, supposedly, through the use of very expensive treatments.  These images are impossible to obtain in other cultures.  By reinforcing this false idea of beauty in other cultures, it will take women and men in these cultures more money to try to look like the false women and men in ads.  By wasting money, that they do not have, it becomes a continuation of the cycle of poverty in third world countries like in Latin America.