The Quest for the Perfect Body
Historically, physical exercise was reserved for gym class participants and male athletes. Now, there is a treadmill or elliptical machine at every garage sale from coast to coast. The rise of home fitness equipment in the United States is a fascinating study of a need that has been created based on the surrounding cultural references of the time. The surge of health consciousness and the ever-increasing social pressures for attaining physical perfection combined with the desire to achieve those goals in the privacy and convenience of your own home have lead to the multi-million dollar industry that is home fitness equipment. Home fitness equipment has permeated into the culture of our everyday life. While not everyone owns a piece of home fitness equipment like a car or television, the equipment itself is commonly recognized as a staple of the American home. How did home exercise equipment get to be a staple of the American household? Through advertising. While the advertising demographic target has included men, I would like to focus this paper on how advertising is used to promote home exercise equipment to women. Targeting the female demographic group for home fitness equipment seems like a step in th
I will also share from my personal experience with fitness and how it correlates with the semiotic analysis of the printed advertisements. The models overall were somewhat toned, but there was no evidence of muscle. " The flat stomachs, narrow waists, full busts, hips, full lips, and long hair are all used in the advertisement to prove to the female consumer that the product will not create a gender-role conflict. She is young, attractive and very fit. Any attempt to reconstruct the body is transgressive against the 'natural' identity of the female body. Beyond using models with virtually unattainable bodies to psychologically create a need for home fitness equipment (the "I want to look like that!" phenomenon), home fitness equipment advertisers are defining for women how to engage in traditionally masculine activities in a manner that is unthreatening to the cultural definitions of gender. The advertisement for the Versa Climber featured a model that was posed to accentuate the roundness of her hip. Czisma, Wittig and Schurr (1988), for example, have suggested that female athletes often struggle because of what they perceive as a conflict between sociocultural expectations of femininity and the reality that a larger, stronger physical body type is required to compete at elite levels. The idea that women need to be careful not to create a gender-role conflict is not a new one. She is an impossible combination of strength and athleticism balanced out with feminism and sexuality. After having looked at several women's fitness magazines and visiting my local gym to talk to people who were using the same equipment in a different context, some very disturbing revelations came about. At six feet tall with broad shoulders and huge muscular thighs, I not only was very self-conscious of my lack of 'femininity', it was reinforced by school mates. " If the ideal female athlete presented is not even an athlete at her maximum potential, the message to young females is that being female is first, being an athlete comes second. Several studies have been conducted in this area but the results are fairly consistent, even across generations. I feel that the company is reacting to fears that women have that have been put into place by society.
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Acceptance Essays
