Exploitation

This week in class we discussed Bradley's recent blog in which he defended the exploitation of women in advertisements and it got me thinking about a few things.

First, what do we mean by exploiting? I looked up the word exploit on merriam-webster.com and the definitions it gave me were as follows:

1.  to make productive use of : utilize <exploiting your talents> <exploit your opponent's weakness>

2

: to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage<exploiting migrant farm workers>

This provides an extremely broad view of exploitation as one may view it positively or negatively. A model posing in her underwear to sell a product may be looked at in multiple ways. One may believe she is the one exploiting, as she is using her body to make money and start/continue her career. Contrastingly, others may believe she is the one being exploited, as a company is using her body to sell their product. Regardless, why is it an issue? If the model is profiting from the pay she is receiving, and the company is profiting from the revenue the advertisement produces, then who loses? For those that wish to counter with "the public loses because these advertisements create a negative stereotype and lead to eating disorders," you're wrong. People WANT to see skinny beautiful models in advertisements. If people didn't want this, they would stop buying products from companies that use this type of advertisement. And I don't see Victoria's Secret going out of business anytime soon...

Additionally, men are exploited just as much as women are. Michael Jordan is exploited by Nike who makes billions of dollars off the Jordan brand. Nike never mentions Jordan's philanthropy work, they just mention how good he was at basketball. And do you think Michael Jordan cares? Absolutely not- he's laughing all the way to the bank. Just like those models who get paid tons of money to take their clothes off. Whether you want to call it exploitation or not, they call it making money.