You make a good point. There’s a fine line between exploitation by advertisers and exploitation of one’s personal physical gifts. Both seek to sell something although I agree with your argument that the woman getting dolled up is interested in the reaction to her personally.

But models in a beer commercial must have similar thoughts, no? What the company is after is product recognition. If a specific model’s body aids in that effort, might that necessarily mean that a woman is using the exposure in a commercial to make a personal statement about her own beauty?

It’s a stretch I’ll admit. But the reaction to beauty when we see it is almost universally positive - by both sexes. One wonders how advertisers got along by doing anything else.

I think I disagree with this. When a woman uses makeup or clothing to accentuate her beauty and call attention to it, whether it’s done tastefully or poorly, the point is to attract attention. Attention that’s being paid to her. In philosophical terms, the attention isn’t the means to an end, it’s the goal itself. Whereas when advertising uses images of beautiful women to sell their products, their beauty isn’t the main point of the ad. It’s merely being used, exploited, to sell cars or beer or whatever. So the difference is in the point, the goal, of how the beauty is being used. Is it being used as an end, or a means to an end? The latter is exploitative, IMHO, while the former is not (or is, at least, less so).

And the male response to it: “Buy your own house, bitch.”

I wonder if your wording here was intentional!

The Playboy versus the Momma’s Boy.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2005/11/bush-and-his-women.html