Response - Sexualized Images

As a seventeen-year-old girl who is half Japanese, I typically find sexualized images to be problematic. Firstly, the people who create these images and advertisements often misrepresent my race––Japanese women are nearly always portrayed as passive geisha, whereas Japanese men are shown as exotic samurai. They also depict teenage girls in a manner that is oversimplified and hypocritical. For example, many advertisements encourage girls to use makeup and wear revealing clothes, but to still appear and act naive. And finally, these people tend to sexualize women more often than men, popularizing the idea that women should be valued more for their sex appeal than for who they are as people.

Despite the fact that I dislike these images, I will admit that they are powerful in the sense that they impact the way that other men and women are perceived. Because sexualization is ubiquitous in our modern culture, it establishes a “norm” in terms of behavior and appearance: men and women are made to believe that they must fit the standards set by these images. All of this is incredibly harmful––as I previously explained, these expectations are unrealistic and inaccurate.