Fast food, a guilty pleasure for many, as today’s
society only seems to grants an identity of success and happiness to people
that follow a rigid healthy lifestyle, where vegan super foods, crazy fruit-vegetable
smoothies and inflexible non-gluten diets are the norm for daily life. We are
all pushed to have the perfect healthy well-trained bodies, as this would supposedly
create the best life you can live. But fast food joints still need to sell their
full on calorie packed, grease dripping, diabetes-generating fatty products,
that symbolize everything that is unhealthy. So they had to come up with a strategy
to keep the sales coming in. And what will always sell? That’s right, Sex.
I would argue that fast food brand are increasingly
more often creating advertisements in which they sexualise their product, often
linking it to the female sex in particular. Women are used to sell this kind of
‘forbidden’ food, sensualising the unhealthy product. The burger packed with
calories, generates and obsession with what people secretly want to possess and
devour. This lust for the unhealthy product is linked to sexual lust, desire
and the craving to satisfy your needs.
Sex is this way becomes actual consumption of the
food that is portrayed in a sexual setting. The women is very often portrayed
in a very sexy, passionate way, almost as if she is partaking in a sexual act
with the food she is eating. The taboo of looking at her, as she is performing a
forbidden intimate practice, is linked to the notion that it is a forbidden practice
as well to eat the unhealthy thing she is eating. Letting the woman eat a
burger and fast food is then regarded as sexy, she is doing something she isn’t
actually allowed to do, unholy, forbidden food, because she has to be skinny. The
consumption of sex is thus equal to the consumption of the product.
I would also like to claim by making women’s bodies synonymous
with the actual product, as if women are items to be bought, to have control
over, to own for your own pleasure, and are equally disposable, fast food
companies create a structural degradation of how women are seen in our society.
Women become a commodity, the become the product and are thus objectified, as
the comparison of lust for a woman and lust for a product is one of the most
popular ways to gain revenue and increase sales. Sexualizing advertisements is
a simple, effective technique to attract attention to the brand, either by envy
of the woman’s sexuality or by commercializing her.
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