Race and Advertising

Virginia Slims and Virgin Boef

Easy to Swallow Social Poison and a Mad Cow Solution)

Popular media today is driven by the advertisements that fund it, and our society is significantly influenced by the images that are found within those advertisements. It is said that the popular consumer is both the producer and the product of social inequality and this can be seen as strongly in the portrayal and interpretation of gender and race stereotypes as in any other example. Advertisements have been shown to exaggerate cultural differences between genders and races. (Coltrane, Messineo) While the unfair caricatures of certain groups may not be as blatantly cartoonish and obvious as those of decades past, there still remains a very definite stereotypical set of boundaries into which different groups, especially minorities, must fall in order to be featured in the majority of popular media. These kinds of portrayals,...
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