In 2016, Carl's Jr./Hardee’s premiered their Bacon Three-Way Burger TV commercial, ‘Fantasy’ with the tagline “Eat It Like You Mean It.” This advertisement begins with bacon sizzling in a pan before cutting to a gorgeous woman smiling flirtatiously cutting up the bacon. The bacon then becomes a prop for the woman to use to draw attention to her body. The ad then introduces two other females similarly dressed in skimpy white lingerie. The camera pays “special attention” to them as well by zooming in on prominent features of their body such as their butt, breasts, and mouth. The rest of the ad is simply the demonstration of sexually suggesting behavior between the women and the props. This goes as far as the women using the sauce and the bacon to exemplify oral sex along with the teasing of kissing between two of the women. Even the women themselves seem to be enjoying the show they are producing by rubbing and touching their bodies. To top it all off, the song "Threesome" by Dirt Nasty is playing in the background. Carl's Jr. takes their product of a three-way burger and advertises it as a different kind of three-way in order to capture their audience’s attention to show just what a "fantasy" burger means.
In almost every single cut of this commercial, there is an underlying representation of the sexualization of women. If the outfits were not enough to demonstrate it, the camera angles were sure to make up for anything missing. In just the third cut of the camera, the breasts of one of the women were shown zoomed in. The only other thing to make it in the angle was the bacon the girl used to trace the outline of her body. With three women in this film, one might question whose body this was, but not even a face was shown to go with it. This is a demonstration of what Jean Kilbourne wrote about in her article, "Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt." She describes what they are doing and demonstrating to their viewers as pornographic for "it dehumanizes and objectifies people, especially women, and because it fetishizes products, imbues them with erotic charge" (Kilbourne, Pg 489 Para 2). Her words ring true here because the face is not what is important to the person who fetishizes this, but just the object of their attention and what they could do with it.
Not only are the women under the camera lens getting hurt, but the ones viewing them at home. Every girl and every woman places themselves and others under a lens. This lens is how we view ourselves and those surrounding us and the media has a large part in controlling that. In Jean Kilbourne's film, Killing Us Softly 4, she claims how over time the media is doing what it has always done and this telling us "what is most important is how we look.” She credits this process to how "we all grow up in a culture in which women's bodies are constantly turned into things and into objects" (Killing Us Softly 4). This ad is a perfect demonstration of this. Notice how they all look familiar? It just another example of how the perfect body is the stereotypical skinny and blonde white girl. They all have full lips, full breasts, no wrinkles, no flaws, and a perfect silhouette. Now it is not their fault they look like this, but the media is advertising women alike for being "the fantasy." Also, if the internal pressure is not enough, Kilbourne emphasizes in her article how “girls are subjected to barking, grunting and mooing calls and labels of “dogs, cows, or pigs” when they pass by groups of male students; those who are teased about not measuring up to buxom, bikini-clad [models]”(p. 510). So not only are girls pressured by themselves through one's human need to look and feel their best, but also in order to simply not be harassed or judged further by men for not meeting their media idealized standards.
Kilbourne, Jean. "Three Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt." Rereading America. Eds. Colombo, Cullen, Lisle. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's P. 2013.
Killing Us Softly 4. Perf. Jean Kilbourne. Dir. Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, 2011.
"Carl’s Jr. | Bacon 3-Way Burger “Fantasty” - extended edition commercial." YouTube, uploaded by Liviu Marica, 3 Aug 6 https://youtu.be/xpWMU0lUmR8
Screenshots: "Carl’s Jr. | Bacon 3-Way Burger “Fantasty” - extended edition commercial." YouTube, uploaded by Liviu Marica, 3 Aug. 6