Last edited Tue Sep 24, 2013, 03:52 AM - Edit history (1)
And yes men do indeed control advertising.
I don't know what to say if you haven't read anything about how identifies are constructed. I'm guessing you've never read post-structuralist theory, much in gender studies, critical race theory, or cultural history. Society generates cultural expectations and ideas that frame how people see the world. Women are rewarded for their appearance.
It's really not unlike any set of cultural assumptions that frame how people in a given historical period see the world: like, for example, the difference in the understanding of knowledge, God, and the natural world pre-and post-Enlightenment. Other examples are how understanding of labor, money, and employer responsibility is culturally bound. Only in the past century or so has money itself come to be seen as a virtue. Capitalism has created a cultural environment in which women's bodies are treated as commodities, along with other objects bought and sold in contemporary society. Our cultural circumstances frame how we understand gender, just as they do race. Pretending it is natural is like imagining race is biological. They are not. They are cultural notions, historically bound.