Marketing 101 : Sell the Female Body

Football is generally considered the terrain of men as opposed to women. I hate to make this sweeping gendered statement but it is the fact and essential to what I intend to say.

So why did Citi FM; the acclaimed “wokest” of all the radio stations in Ghana have a picture of a woman with evidently long legs taking center stage in this advertisement of a premier league match? Why not a man or none at all? Or a picture of the act of football being played? Are the crest of these teams not enough to advertise the game?

It is in these small often not thought about ways that the body of a woman continues to be sexualized and objectified. The far reaching effects of such images are not really appreciated but the constant bombardment of such images to sell food, cars, sports and anything you can actually think of only reinforces the thin and slender ideal of what a woman is supposed to look like. The service industry is probably the most complicit in this; usually using femininity to sell services.

It is no wonder that social media is awash with various body enhancement products that purport to make women lose weight in ridiculous amounts of time to what suspiciously looks like the current media ideal. Women are constantly disciplining their bodies, using all sorts of waist trainers and hips boosters, weight loss, dietary supplements etc to model their bodies to a certain desirable body shape when we all know that the way to lose weight is through exercising and maintaining a proper diet. It is almost akin to the 17^th century era and the use of corsets to achieve a certain body ideal among women. The waist trainer is actually just the corset reinvented.

Of course, based on this kind of depictions, which become unconsciously ingrained, men begin to demand their female partners looks this way. Depicting women in this “one size fits all” kind of discourse is what has led to intense body dissatisfaction and disordered eating among women in the US. Probably, the effects are not as heightened in Ghana now but it will gradually come to it if we keep on this path.

I am not saying that this kind of surveillance of the body is limited to only women. Some studies have shown that men are becoming equally pressurized to fit into certain ideals but that is child’s play compared to what women have to go through.

This constant surveillance of the bodies of women and the way women are depicted in advertisements which are published in the mass media only goes further to undermine the position of a woman. I hope that women subsequently come to realize that they do not have to fit in with societal ideals to be happy and comfortable in their bodies.