No Women

The producers of the liquor advertisements that I have found use sexuality as a means of selling their alcohol. They sexualize women and use sexuality to gain one's attention and ultimately want to make you decide to buy this alcohol. In the Crown Royal advertisement, it is a progression of the bottle being uncovered from its velvet exterior. Most people who drink know that this whiskey comes in a velvet covering so it is not hard to understand what is happening. At the top of the page is how you would open the box and find the alcohol. It is sealed by the purple sack. The middle picture is the sack coming off the bottle, but it is still covering more than half of the bottle. The third and final picture is the sack lying behind the completely exposed bottle. This progression of the bottle being uncovered is reminiscent of a woman undressing from her clothes. Even though there is no woman in the advertisement or any mention of a woman I believe that because this ad was found in a men's magazine it is supposed to be like a woman undressing. This is also aided by the fact that underneath is the word, "Irresistible." You rarely hear of an alcohol being described that way. Normally, it is a woman being described as that. This is why I believe that they wanted to spark something in the viewer's mind that made them think of a woman. This may in turn lead some to buy the alcohol just for the simple fact that they may think that this drinking this whiskey will lead to a woman undressing.

The Maker's Mark advertisement is fairly straightforward in its attempt to relate the alcohol to a woman, and is actually demeaning to women in the process. The layout of the ad is text on the left side and the mortise of the bottle on the right. The mortise actually plays more of a role in that it is not simply there to show what the bottle looks like but there is a reflection of it underneath. It's reflection shows it with a womanly figure. The reason that it does is because the text reads, "Your bourbon has a great body and find character. I wish the same could be said for my girlfriend." Men reading this may either agree that their girlfriends don't have a good body of character, may disagree, or may not even have a girlfriend. Either way, they understand that the alcohol is described well and that women are not. The ad is relating this alcohol to women by having the reflection shaped in the form of a woman with a small waist like an hourglass figure. The way that the text and mortise are placed is what Kress and Van Leeuwen deem the given and the new. The given "means that it is presented as something the viewer or reader already knows" (Jewitt and Oyama; 148) The statement about the girlfriend not have a "fine character" and a "great body" should therefore be something that the reader already knows. He may already know that his girlfriend does not have these qualities or think that many women don't either. The new, or the bottle with the hourglass reflection should be the information that is not already known to the viewer. He may not have known what the bottle looked like, or that it has those qualities as described by the text.