Advertising has a long history of unethical and sexist representations of women in advertising media. It poorly represents women in a narrow light ignoring the vast differences and diversity that is the female gender. In this way advertising is ideologically problematic as it un-ethically targets an audience and in doing so it ignores, judges, objectifies and mistreats the audience it is targeting. This is especially obvious when women are used in advertisements where the target audience is specifically male. Sexism and sexist advertising is rife in the advertising industry even today when the idea of sexism and sexist behaviour are identified as inaccurate and inappropriate representations of women or men. .
Within the advertising industry female objectification and sexualization can appear in nearly any market although it appears the most within the fashion and beauty industries as well as the food and health industries. While this is the general place where the worst offenders of sexual objectification appears, the sexual objectification of women appears often in car ads or any other male centred advertising. These sexually explicit ads, employed for a myriad of products, negatively portray women solely in terms of one narrow and stereotypically presented aspect of their gender roles: as sexual objects (Treise et al. 1994 pg.61) These advertisements use objectification to suggest that men buy the product to help them attract the women they represent in their advertisement. This is often achieved non-verbally or covertly, the semiotic use of the female form or hourglass figure and overtly sexualized imagery of women as sexual objects. This contrasts the female based sexism where subvert or overt sexist messages generally suggest to women that there product can assist them in looking like the model in the advertisement and that this will assist them in attracting a quality male.
The problematic and sexist ideologies expressed through this type of advertising directs opinions of women in the mass public as objects for sexual pleasure and desire.