Review on Midriff Advertising

“It takes a man to know what it is to be a real woman” (Hagedorn, 1994, p.97) – this is how women were portrayed in the past by the media - submissive and subservient. They were constantly shown performing maternal roles like housework, cooking and child rearing (Kaufman, 1999). Similarly, the roles of women in advertisements are conditional upon the existence of a man or the capacity to attract a man (Klein, 1993). As such, women are depicted as objects of desire, valued for their attractiveness but with little else to do, while men are seen as superior to women. Also, women’s body parts are portrayed as mannequins in advertising which suggests that women are “objects and therefore less than human” (Cortese, 2008, p. 42). This proliferation of the exaltation and objectification of women’s bodies promotes fictitious images of women and misconstrue physical reality. In recent years, with the wave of feminism, there has been a significant change in the representation of women in advertisements - they are presented as active, self-reliant and sexually active, instead of passive objects of the male gaze (Gill, 2008). This phenomenon is due to the emergence of midriff advertising that showcase women as individualistic and pursuing their own interests, instead of the traditional notion of women being submissive and subservient. Midriff advertising entails the emphasis between the top of the pubis bone and the bottom of the rib cage. Surely it is difficult to put forth a cogent argument that such a change will be detrimental, especially when women are being empowered in media.

This paper shall seek to prove that despite the shift away from objectification in advertisements to midriff advertising in US to correct the stereotype of women being submissive and subservient, these efforts to liberate women from deep-seated stigma by conferring new gender roles prove to be as restrictive as before. This is due to the fact that midriff advertising merely re-sexualizes women’s...