2014 and the Misogyny in Advertisement has not gone away

The previous ad was aired for Valentino….to promote high fashion clothing or an extremely sexist, problematic attitude towards women. This extremely troubling ad mirrors an equally troubling ad from the “Mad Men era”. 

These two ads are extremely problematic, although one could argue the older ad was just a joke, the fact that there is an audience out there that would find this sort of thing funny is just as frustrating. The other thing that really bothers me is that these two ads are almost exactly alike-except for the year. It is 2014 and women are still being portrayed as non existent and these kinds of ads that perpetuate the attitude that women are not worth even treating them with dignity, wrongly justifies the inequalities women face. The Valentino ad romanticizes the violence against the woman in the pretty red dress, it makes the whole image sexy. The portrayal of women as rugs, made for walking all over and their only purpose is to serve men in whatever degrading way the can, is so damaging to women’s self identity. How are we supposed to teach young boys to treat women not only with respect but as their equals, that girls have the ability to do anything boys do. How are we supposed to instill these values when they are bombarded with images of the exact opposite message in media every single day. Conversely, how are we supposed to teach young girls that they are in fact equal to the boys in their class when they flip through magazines and see these sexist images such as the Valentino ad, where a man is LITERALLY stepping on a young women’s throat, in his $300 shoes of course. When young boys and girls, not only younger generations but older (as they are the ones putting such images out there) see images that project misogyny it is detrimental to their perceptions of male and female roles in society and relationships.