The ideals of how a woman should look have changed through the years. Nowadays the ideals are getting more and more unreachable and at the same time advertising can reach us everywhere. The average person sees between 400-600 ads every day. That means that you can’t go out on the street, open a newspaper or turn on the TV without facing the perfect woman. Thin, beautiful, young and always smiling. A picture very hard to identify with.

In 1988 the advertising line established ERK (The ethical council against sex discriminating advertising).Their main assignment is to prevent sex discriminating advertising and to decide if adverts are discriminating or not. The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has basic rules which say that advertising experts have to have a feeling of social responsibility when they create adverts. ERK’s judgements are based on those rules.

Advertising is a good way for companies to sell more and to increase their profit. So of course they want to have advertising that people notice. But advertising also creates ideals and keeps them alive. Many women would do almost everything to look like the models in the adverts. Plastic-surgery increases in Sweden and 200 000 Swedes suffer from eating disorders. In a study, girls aged 14-18 were exposed to images of models. This study shows that the girls who were exposed to the typical models evaluated themselves and their appearance more negatively than the girls who had been exposed to ”overweight” models. In another study some scientists looked at the incidents of anorexia nervosa during a 50-year period. They noticed that when the thin ideals were the most extreme the number of anorexia nervosa incidents also were the highest. So a connection between how women look in media and what ”normal” girls and women think about their bodies is obvious.

It’s impossible to define what sex discriminating advertising is, because everyone reacts to and are influenced differently by advertising. But what exactly do people find so upsetting about thinly dressed women? Mostly it’s not the fact that they are almost naked, it’s more how they look and appear. They are always thin, beautiful and young and on the pictures they are passive and don’t show any will or strength. People often find it strange that models appear in odd positions were the clothes aren’t the most important thing. Many people also think that this kind of adverts insult and humiliate women. But of course the opinions are different from person to person.

Women of today are encouraged to take place, to get a good education and to react against sex discrimination. At the same time society doesn’t react very much when the ideals of beauty has gone too far. Something is wrong when 57 % of every fifteen-year old girl think that she is too fat. When they feel so ugly that they want to have a plastic surgery and when seven-year old girls diet. I don’t mean that it’s only the adverts fault that girls and women feel like this. But I think that a legislation against sex discriminating advertising would make the ideals a whole lot better. Girls and women shouldn’t have to compare themselves to models who look like Barbie dolls. Today’s unreal ideals have to change. We have to be allowed to feel satisfied with ourselves because everyone is beautiful in their own way.