Kate Upton was featured in Carl Jr./ Hardees commercial to advertise a new burger called Southwest patty melt topped with jalapeno and spicy sauce. The commercial begins with Kate Upton sitting in the car at a drive-in movie theater and she’s getting ready to watch the movie as she gets settled, she takes a bite of her burger. As she is eating the burger the camera zooms in on her taking a bite. There are serval clips where they zoom in on her taking off her jacket and showing her cleavage. Towards the end of the commercial there’s a boy that is supposed to be watching a movie with his girlfriend but instead he’s looking over in the car next to him looking at Kate making out with her sandwich. This ad would fit Jean Kilbourne “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt” Advertising and Violence, because Kate’s actions in this commercial as she is advertising her body as well as she has attracted the attention of a guy bystander in another vehicle.
In this scene Upton is being sexualized because it shows her sitting on the back of the car with her legs in the air. You can see she looks like most of the women that is in advertisement. They have a smaller waistline and bigger cleavage, the hourglass shape because they know it would grasp the attention of an audience. In the article it says “The way that ads portray bodies especially women’s bodies as objects conditions us to see each other in dehumanizing ways thus ‘normalizing’ attitudes that can lead to sexual aggression” ( Kilbourne pg.488). Women have to look a certain way in order to feature in a magazine, commercial, or etc. In Killing Us Softly 4 it mentioned us "women spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and money to achieve a look but feeling ashamed and guilty because the idea is to look absolutely flawless". This woman body represent how other women body should look. There was another scene where it showed the boy and his girlfriend in the car and the clothes, what she was wearing was plain, and Upton is in the car next to them wearing a black and white polka dot dress with a blush pink sweater. Upton has gained the attention of the guy in the other car because of her body language and the display of her bigger cleavage.
Figure 1: Traditional Beauty
Figure 2: Kate Upton eating the burger
In another scene, where she takes a bite of the sandwich and the jalapenos she started to take off her sweater because she appeared to be getting hot. In the article it says, “Sex in advertising is pornographic because it dehumanizes and objectifies people, especially women, and because it fetishizes products, imbues them with erotic charge – which dooms us to disappointment since products never can fulfill our sexual desires or meet our emotional needs” (Kilbourne pg.489 para 2). She was presenting herself in a provocative sexual demeanor when she was putting her legs in the air and crawling on the back of the car, almost revealing what was under her dress. In figure 2 it is a picture of her with her legs open with the Carl Jr. bag in between her legs and she’s making a provocative pose that shows off her cleavage. In this scene she's having sexual moment with the sandwich like she was making out with a man.
In the final scene you see the guy looking over at Upton and she is taking a bite of the burger and stripping out of her clothes. The guy’s girlfriend noticed that he was looking at Upton and grabbed him by the chin and turned his head back in the direction of the movie. Even after the guy’s girlfriend caught him looking at Upton and turned his head back on to Upton . Upton may actually be hot from eating the jalapenos on the burger, but because the way she is trying to “cool off’ it has attracted possibly unwanted attention from a male whom she does not know. Just because a female has a nice physique and dresses in a way to be comfortable does not mean that it is okay for negative or unwanted attention. “The way that ads portray bodies especially women’s bodies as objects conditions us to see each other in dehumanizing ways thus ‘normalizing’ attitudes that can lead to sexual aggression” ( Kilbourne pg.488). These types of behaviors are what makes a woman feel uncomfortable in how they look and dress. Whenever a woman is looking like Upton men tends to want to have sex because it's turning them on.
Figure 3: The boy is looking at Kate Upton
Conclusion:
In conclusion, this ad was supposed to advertise Carl Jr./ Hardees new burger but instead you see more of the model than the actual burger. The video was 56 seconds and out of the whole video you see the burger for a few seconds. The majority of the video was showing a lot of cleavage, legs, and provocative pose. Kilbourne would think this Ad is bad because they are using a woman to advertise a sandwich, but she is doing some sexual things but also is attracting a boy's attention.
Work Cited
"Kate Upton Carl's Jr. Commercial." YouTube, upload by Sam Kitling, 4 April 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AdViveJYD0.
Kilbourne, Jean. "Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising and Violence" Rereading America, edited by Cullen, Colombo & Lisle, Bedford/ St. Martin's P, 2016, pp.488-513.
Killing Us Softly 4. Directed by Sut Jhally, performance by Jean Kilbourne, The Media Education Foundation, 2010