Advertisements have the power to control us whether we are aware of their intentions or not. Advertising psychologically manipulates the viewer to become obsessed with thinness, to become obsessed with an unachievable model of beauty, to conform to a trivialized cultural standard of beauty, to learn self-hate"-Jean Killbourne
Pick up a magazine and the first thing you see is an advertisement. Then flip through the rest of it; every single page is an advertisement and every single advertisement is selling something other than their product. It's called subliminal messages. The pictures of women that are publicized to society create in our mind a "perfect body" and sex. Most advertisements I have seen show women to have an hourglass figure, tight ass, big breasts, and exude sexual body language. Not only are these advertisements selling their product, but selling women and sex as well. I never see anything but thin women on billboards, commercials, and magazines unless they're showing an obese person with words next to it saying something like, "Tired of being called fat?" with a skinny girl standing next to her with the question, "Want to look like this? When you get hungry, instead of going after a juicy hamburger, drink a Slim Fast!" Since when did it become normal to starve yourself to look thin? Why should women have to change what they look like in order to achieve a man's idea of a "perfect woman, with the perfect body?" It's becoming more and more normal for women to throw up after meals or to not eat at all. Eleven percent of women in America have eating disorders.
Many of us have been taken in by these messages, both women and men. It is hard not to be when they are always screaming at us, "Look like this women!" or "If you buy this product, you will recieve lots of sex!" We may not know it when wer're flipping through a magazine and we see the advertisements, but we are indeed being "psychologically manipulated." The media is brainwashing us and we don't even realize it. With advertisements selling sex, perfect bodies, men having power over women, women being portrayed as passive and vulnerable, and men needing to be agressive and show no emotion, being constantly hammered into our heads everyday; we really need to pay more attention to what we are looking at, the things we are buying, and what we are absorbing. If we don't, society will continue to be manipulated by the advertisements that are being publicized.
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Unfortunately, advertising through manufactured associations (tennis shoes with large muscles, deodorant with sex) has been the norm for decades. Fake associations have been used for every kind of persuasion way longer, though. For example, Republicans and Democrats often associate their opponents or their positions with evil forces in history to discredit them, rather than actually dealing with the ideas. For example, they recall the USSR to argue against high taxes, or somehow use the fact that Scandinavia is socialist to oppose gay marriage.
It's a fallacy that makes people feel good about the product by making them feel bad about something else. It's just that in the case of advertising, you feel bad about your sex life if you don't buy the shaving cream, instead of feeling bad about Joseph Stalin if you don't buy a tax cut.
Advertisers are pure, unadulterated evil. I've heard that marketeers will actually have children come to the office for parties and things, so that the marketers can study them in a play-style environment and better discern how to market to them. Creepy, no?
Having said that, and knowing that you are one who can appreciate the vast advertising evil in the world, I think you might be fascinated by the concept of Fnord.
(if you can't see the fnords they won't eat you)