Getting Out of the Kitchen and Into the Bedroom

"Sex sells" is a common phrase popular in the world of advertising and marketing. More specifically, it is the sexual material plastering the pages of magazines in various forms of advertisements such as cologne or alcohol, selling not only the product itself, but also the women who inhabit it. This book gives a brief introduction to the sexual history behind "the gaze"-the lustful stare man places on a woman, its impact on advertising, and how America's universities are not properly informing their undergraduates of the overtly sexual content. Many commercials and print ads today have a misogynist theme, making the woman's role lesser than her male counterpart. What do these images demonstrate to America's youth? With each overly sexual picture plastered on billboards 45 feet in the air or hidden within magazines, the idealized image of women-according to Jean Kilbourne (1999), an author and speaker on the image of women in advertising-is becoming the norm, influencing how we, especially men, judge real women.