Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: With the increasing development of advertising campaign, advertising has already penetrated into every aspect of social and economic life. The advertising scholar Berman used to assert that the dominant social mechanism in popular culture is advertising and images in advertising are the best index to examine the popular culture. However, it can be seen that there is a tendency of sex discrimination in advertising. In the portrayal of female images in advertisements, the natural quality of women’s bodies is excessively emphasized while the due social position and social value that woman as a role of the society have been neglected. This paper analyzes the tendency of sexism in Chinese advertising and its expressions, aiming at attracting more and more social attention on women’s status so as to change the widespread prejudice people have toward women.      

Key words: Chinese advertising; sexism; causes; phenomenon; negative influence

摘要：随着广告活动的日益发展，广告已经深入到社会经济生活的各个方面。广告学者伯曼曾斩钉截铁地断言：在大众文化中，最具支配性的社会机制是广告。广告形象是考察当代大众文化现象的最佳指标。但是我们也应该看到，广告中存在对女性性别歧视的倾向。广告在塑造女性形象时，过分重视女性身体的自然属性，却忽视了女性作为社会角色应有的社会位置和社会价值。本文旨在分析汉语广告中的性别歧视倾向及其表现，希望借此引起更多的社会关注，从而改变社会对女性的启示和偏见。

关键词：汉语广告；性别歧视；原因；现象；负面影响

1. Introduction
As the market economy develops, advertising has penetrated into every part of the social and economical life of countless households, with its rapid speed, wide coverage, and broad social influence, becoming an important integrant of social cultural system. As a matter of fact, advertising not only affects people’s consuming behavior, but exerts tremendous effect on people’s lifestyle, values, morality as well as other concepts. However, it is also worthwhile to note that in the portrait of female images, advertising always tries to make advantage of the predominant ideological form in the society to construct the meaning and mode of gender. Therefore, what advertising transmits to the public is more and more unfair and negative recognitions and evaluations of females. Mr. Shi Yibin pointed out that sexism in advertising has become flagrant and conspicuous, which is even blatant and does not need to conceal at all. “Superficially, women are only made, in advertisements, the objects to being watched and enjoyed, and as the targets meeting the needs of men’s sexual desire. Essentially, however, it is a phenomenon of male domination over female, violating the dignity and equality of female character”.