An androcentric position can easily be seen through any number of popular magazine publications. I conducted a study of five different magazines, all accessible to buy while in line at the supe

Both women and men see the female in general and the female body in particular as more the object of male sexual desire than as a desiring sexual subject (or agent). This objectification, which manifests itself in the extraordinary emphasis on a woman’s physical attractiveness in American culture, as well as in the almost continuous display of the nude or seminude female body in art, advertising, and the mass media, constitutes an eroticizing of sexual inequality – as opposed to merely a celebrating of female sexuality – because it implicitly imposes a male perspective on the definition of female sexuality. It androcentrically defines women – and predisposes women to define themselves – not in terms of their own sexual desires but in terms of their ability to stimulate and satisfy the male’s sexual desires. (Bem 164)

A result of the exploitation of the female physical appearance is the epidemic amount of women with eating disorders. Nearly one-tenth of young American women and one-fifth of female American students are on some form of a diet. They are trying to mimic the “heroin chic” look of the Calvin Klein models. What is actually happening is a societal phenomenon of female thinness. Nevertheless, the thinness has gotten out of hand. Nearly one million American women yearly have some form of an eating disorder, and begin the starvation rituals early in life. Anorexia and bulimia are the most common types of disorders, claiming the lives of 150,000 women each year. The unobtainable expectations set by the male advertisers are killing more women every year than the AIDS epidemic (Wolf 88). The establishing, by men, of a perfect female physical norm, was simply a solution to the women’s movement and reproductive freedom. I wholeheartedly agree with Naomi Wolf, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.”

The dominant white male shows his power in advertising through more than just the degradation of women, but the plain exclusion of homosexuals. Looking through the five magazines, I found only one ad that was aimed at a homosexual audience. It was an ad for “Queer Eye for The Straight Guy”, showing all of the cast members playing dress up. The ad was only for a television sh

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