Your Gonna Eat or Your Gonna Starve

Throughout time food has always been a big burden considering the way society looks at male and female feeding habits. No matter how much we deny every human is affected by what others think about our bodies. Products such as Ephedria, Slim-fast, Weight Watchers, and the nutra sweet flavor of our most hated Diet Coke have landed on the store shelves placing a mental stigma on the females and males. Everyday people across the nation of America race through the hurdles of weight loss, abusive eating habits, and the various temptations. Susan Bordo, a scholar of humanities in the University of Kentucky, has written an essay called “Hunger as Ideology” that encapsulates the psychological, social, and cultural trends of men and women about food. Probably the most interesting and important point that Bordo focuses on is the cultural acceptance of advertisements setting negative trends on our culture. She deftly focuses on how these advertisements almost brainwash us to eating or losing weight. Her essay is an important part in understanding the American’s ideology on food

since 60% of all Americans are overweight and one-fourth of all Americans are obese (Hawkes 44).

Our vulnerabilities are exposed in these advertisements with the myriad amounts of sexual content. The nail polish commercials and the Cover Girl commercials all entice sexual connotations with thin women displaying their “plastic” beauty. These women usually look thin and fit into the archetypal image of the American “Barbie” doll. The models that advertise food use sex to sell by positioning of body, revealing clothes, and perspective. According to the Journal of Advertising Research, these models set the image of a “superwoman” increasing the overall advertisement effectiveness (Jaffe and Berger 32). They set the stereotypical image of beauty into the children of today. 72 percent of third to fifth graders today have had some history of dieting (Lemberg and Cohn 10). The influences of dieting have affected our children already, and more everyday are risking their health at younger ages. Advertisements do influence the image of what we see as beauty, but it also plays a chord on our emotion solace.

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Some topics in this essay:
Lemberg Cohn, Probably Bordo, Prepare” Bordo, Cover Girl, Diet Coke, Starve Throughout, Jaffe Berger, University Kentucky, Advertising Research, Weight Watchers, image beauty, hawkes 44, school college, set stereotypical, lemberg cohn,