Metaphors and Dehumanization Ideology

1 Introduction

The representation of women in advertising is not a new topic. In fact, there is a large body of literature on this topic, much involving a comparative element, either cross-cultural or diachronic (e.g. Goffman 1979; Pollay 1983; Tse 1989; Cheng 1997; Johansson 2001; Chan and Cheng 2002; Zhang and Harwood 2004; Hung, Li and Belk 2007; Cheng and Wan 2008; Lin 2008; Zhang, Srisupandit and Cartwright 2009). A commonality across these studies is that they transmit a “GDP-fitting” message: with economic development and the modernization process, women’s status has been elevated, and they appear in professional and other settings beyond domesticity, especially the kitchen. However, there should be caution that optimism in women’s elevated status and transformed roles should not give way to the exuberance on display in some sectors, including academic research. If we take a closer look at the data and findings of these studies, especially those present but not highlighted, a not-so-rosy picture emerges.

Cheng (1997), based on a sample of 667 Chinese and US television commercials, found that both countries had more men in occupational roles and more women in non-occupational ones, as well as more men in recreational activities and more women in decorative situations. Hung, Li and Belk (2007) developed a typology of images of modern women in Chinese magazine advertising: the “cultured nurturer” (for family), the “strong woman” (at work), and the “urban sophisticate” (at leisure), as well as the “flower vase” image. From the mere wording of these roles, we can see that among Cheng’s (1997) terms (“occupational,” “recreational,” and “decorative”), “decorative” is the only word whose semantic subject is not human beings, but Cheng still used it for women, which creates a metaphor – WOMEN ARE DECORATIVE. Of Hung, Li and Belk’s (2007) four labels, “flower vase” is the only one that is not semantically equivalent to human beings, but again Hung, Li and Belk used it for women, thus evoking another metaphor – WOMEN ARE FLOWER VASES. These two metaphors share the same meaning, despite their different wording. At the core of their commonality is that women are dehumanized as objects such as decorations and vases.

More recently, Wu and Chung (2011), based on an analysis of 164 TV commercials from Mainland China and Hong Kong, pointed out that “modern women” in China take on hybridized identities, with traditional roles and modern roles converging and competing. This is perhaps the most explicit acknowledgment of the persistence of women’s traditional roles, including the decorative roles. Wu and Chung (2011: 187) defined “decorative” roles as “the female characters being portrayed as passive and non-functional, serving mainly as a sexual or attractive stimulus for the product/service advertised.” Again, words such as “decorative,” “not functional,” and “stimulus” are metaphorical and representative of the dehumanization ideology.

Decoration and stimulus are common functions performed by objects, rather than by human beings. The superficial practice of using women as decoration in ads is driven by a wider, deeper-rooted social and gender ideology that dehumanizes and objectifies women. Therefore, in this study, the definition of women’s decorative roles is extended beyond the definition in previous studies, though this study also uses advertising discourse as its data. Women’s decorative roles in this study are defined as women being used and portrayed as serving mainly as attractive stimuli in society.

Methodologically, the studies mentioned above are also homogenous. Most of them involved large samples of data, at least over 100 and as many as close to 700 pieces of advertising from different sources (e.g. newspapers, magazines, TV, and the Internet), and developed a long codebook to conduct content analysis of the data. To a certain extent, these studies lack in-depth and critical analysis and explanation that links to the ideology that results in such representation of women; they did link the representation to broader societal, economic, and cultural changes, but without going one step further to the ideology domain. Nonetheless, these quantitative studies prove to be very useful in generating broad-brush pictures and trends of certain cultures or times, but risk masking some important nuances that may not be statistically significant.

As an important complement, qualitative studies are found in a neighboring area of study: multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). This strand of study is theoretically informed by Halliday’s (1994) systemic-functional linguistics and attempts to extend the research scope beyond the mode of language to other semiotic resources including graphics, sculpture, gestures, etc. Studies led by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) argue that any text is multimodal, including the most traditional linear pages of books, where elements such as typeface, spacing, paragraphing, justification, and color all play a role in the meaning construction of the text. MDA views the text as not only a product, but also a site where meaning is constructed by employing multiple semiotic resources, and it sets out a central mission to investigate the meaning-making process in multimodal texts, especially how the different semiotic resources/codes come together, multiply, and orchestrate to contribute to meaning making.

Advertising discourse is a popular data source for MDA. Cheong (2004) examined the construal of ideational meaning in print advertisements and proposed a generic structure potential for ads and a new vocabulary to describe multimodal components in ads, such as “Lead,” “Announcement,” and “Emblem,” some of which will be used in this study. Lim (2004) developed an integrative multi-semiotic model for analyzing print advertisements, where different strata of meaning are analyzed. There was a brief mention of ideology in the model, but only as a synonym of the distant non-textual context of text, without any critical or substantive analysis.

Highly relevant to the present study is the recent influence of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory on MDA, which has inspired a number of pioneering studies, e.g. Forceville (1994), El Refaie (2003), Lazar (2009), Feng and O’Halloran (2013) (some of them will be reviewed in greater detail in sections to follow). These studies have produced valuable insights for the identification, construction, and categorization of visual/multimodal metaphors, but most of their data were metaphors whose source and target domains are both things, or both human beings, or human beings in the source domain and human beings in the target domain, but seldom human beings in the target domain and things in the source domain. In contrast, the present study posits that dehumanization of women is mainly realized and reproduced by the last type of metaphors HUMAN BEINGS ARE THINGS.

Motivated by the unusual persistence of the decorative role of women against the background of pro-egalitarian industrialization and modernity, this study, drawing on advertising discourse in Cosmopolitan, the world’s leading women’s magazine, aims to investigate the gender ideology that dehumanizes women by exploring the various dehumanizing metaphors and the visual and linguistic codes that are deployed to construct the metaphors. Specifically, the study attempts to answer the following research questions:

1. What dehumanizing metaphors for women can be identified?

2. How do the metaphors reflect and reproduce dehumanization ideology?

3. How are the metaphors constructed through visual and linguistic resources?

2 Background of the research

3 Methodology

The data of the study was collected from two editions (the USA edition and the Chinese edition) of the March 2011 issue of Cosmopolitan, one of the world’s most circulated, most popular, and most well-known women’s magazines. The choice of the two editions was motivated by the significance of these two countries and their cultures. They are the world’s two largest economies, the USA being the most developed country and China the largest, fast-growing developing country, the USA being typical of Western culture and China rooted in Confucianist culture. It was assumed that the metaphors recurring in these two cultures/editions would provide a fuller picture of women-related metaphors across cultures. Women’s magazines have proven to be important sources of discourse in shaping, manifesting, and maintaining gender ideology (del-Teso-Craviotto 2006). They not only do so through the content stories and reports in the volume, but also through the numerous full-page ads for products targeted at women. The ads are particularly relevant when magazine viewers regard them as shopping catalogs and ideal role models of dressing and grooming. Not designed for content analysis, this study does not provide frequency counts or descriptive statistics; instead, it is qualitative and manually identifies ads involving visual metaphors of different types and at different levels.

An initial survey with the sample suggested that there were mainly two types of dehumanization metaphors about women: OBJECT metaphors and ANIMAL metaphors. Therefore, the analytic framework is tentative in nature and expects to confirm whether new metaphors other than these two will emerge.

The framework for analyzing the data is displayed in Figure 1. The framework can be viewed in either of the following two manners: 1) viewed from top-down, the analysis demonstrates how the ideology of dehumanizing women is realized by the two main types of metaphors – OBJECT metaphors and ANIMAL metaphors, which are further realized and by specific, individual metaphors drawing on visual and/or linguistic resources; 2) viewed from bottom-up, the analysis details micro-level visual and linguistic resources which converge and interact to construct metaphors that contribute to constructing and producing the ideology of dehumanizing women.

Figure 1

Analytic framework

4 Analysis and discussion

This section analyzes the two types of metaphors that dehumanize women: object metaphors and animal metaphors. Analysis involves two aspects: first, at the micro-level, it deals with visual and linguistic resources (codes or semiosis), lexicogrammar and visual grammar that govern the configuration of the words and graphics that produce meanings and realize the metaphors; second, the meanings and realizations are interpreted in terms of how they reflect and reproduce the dehumanization ideology.

4.1 OBJECT metaphors

In this section, metaphors dehumanizing women as objects or things are analyzed. It happens that the objects that are found in our sample are flowers, vases, and paintings. The three semantic categories seem to be related to decorations, so WOMEN ARE DECORATIONS is considered as a metaphor at a higher level, subsuming the three metaphors: WOMEN ARE FLOWERS, WOMEN ARE VASES, and WOMEN ARE PAINTINGS, which will be analyzed below. However, it should be made clear that this short list of three metaphors is not exhaustive: given larger samples, especially from different cultures, there are bound to be other decoration objects. In the same vein, the category of “decoration objects” is also open-ended; there are ample possibilities for women to be compared to other types of objects beyond the decoration domain.

4.1.1 Women are flowers

The WOMEN ARE FLOWERS metaphor is common in our sample. We are familiar with the age-old image of the rose, repeatedly reproduced over time and also taken up by the Scottish poet Robert Burns (“My love is like a red, red rose”). In Chinese culture, the best illustration of WOMEN ARE FLOWERS is a famous and enduring pop song “女人花” (Chinese pinyin: nv ren hua; literal translation: Women Flowers) by the Hong Kong superstar Anita Mui (Chinese pinyin: Mei Yanfang). The song depicts the lifecycle of women as similar to that of flowers: in buds, in full bloom, and fading.

This conceptual metaphor itself is multimodal: it not only suggests the sweet beauty and charm of a woman, but when taking into account smell as an extra mode, compares her body fragrance to the scent of the flower. This is one important motivation for fragrance/perfume products. To some extent, these products are helping to make women into flowers in making them smell like flowers. In other words, the function of the product is metaphorical: to make women smell like flowers. On a second level, the use of the image of flowers in the product design (e.g. ingredients and thus scent; design of the bottle/ ribbon; color)is metaphorical: to make the product like flowers (e.g. look and smell like flowers) so that these attributes will be transferred to women when they use the product. This makes flowers a very important motif/ theme in fragrance/ perfume advertising. The most popular varieties of plants are: orchid, daisy, sea lily, Chinese herbs.

For instance, in an ad for the Estée Lauder lip color gloss (Figure 2), the lips of the model, the displayed products, and the entire background of the full-page ad share the same color of rosy red, while at the same time the textual information makes explicit the flower metaphor, with the enhancer containing lines such as “28 种潮流异彩, 美唇如花样绽放” (pinyin: 28 zhong chaoliu yicai, meichun ru hua yang zhanfang; literal translation: 28 fashion shades, making pretty lips bloom like flowers). The explicit metaphor in the text and the visual metaphor complement each other and the meaning is much more expanded compared to it being expressed with either one of the two modes (the visual or textual). An ad for Maybelline’s lipsticks in the USA edition (Figure 3) takes a similar approach: the color of the female model’s lips and that of a flower are the same, while the other half of the flower’s petals are replaced by an array of lipsticks. Different from the visual-verbal metaphor in the Chinese edition, the latter flower metaphor is purely visual.

Figure 2

Estée Lauder ad

Figure 3

Maybelline ad

4.1.2 Women are vases

A saying in Chinese goes “Women are flower vases,” meaning that beauty is skin-deep, that the only fortune of pretty girls is their good looks, and that they have nothing inside. There happens to be a visual realization of this Chinese verbal metaphor in the USA edition, though with slightly different meanings. In an ad for Marc Jacobs’ fragrance “Oh, Lola!” (see Figure 4 below), the female model holds a vase-shaped bottle of perfume. On top of the bottle’s cap is an over-sized flower, literally making the perfume bottle into a vase. Meanwhile, she rests the “vase” in the most intimate part of her lap. The size and the position of the product point to the metaphor WOMEN ARE VASES, where the decorative role of women is foregrounded.

Figure 4

Marc Jacobs ad

4.1.3 Women are paintings

The magazine devotes most of its volume to ads for cosmetics, ranging from lipstick, lip gloss, lip liner, lip plumper, lip balm, lip conditioner, lip primer, and lip boosters, to face powder, rouge, blush/blusher, bronzer, mascara, eyeliner, eyeshadow, eyebrow waxes/ gels, nail polish, and so much more. Most of these products provide dozens of shades/colors each. Furthermore, many of the products are to be applied with certain tools, e.g. pencils for eyebrows and eyeliners, brushes for many others. The rich array of shades/colors and the whole set of tools evoke images of painting practice. In particular, the tools in both domains are almost identical, even using the same terms, such as “pencils” and “brushes.” As for the metaphorical canvas, it is most often a woman’s face, especially the eye area and the lips, although the usable canvas area can be as big as the full body or as small as a fingernail.

In an ad for Maybelline’s eyeshadow trademarked “Eyestudio,” the female model’s eyes are looking down or almost closed (Figure 5), maximizing the area of her eyeshadow, shaded green. Her lips are also enhanced by lip make-up. The display of the products shows color boxes and pencils together, reinforcing the painting imagery. In fact, the name of the trademark “Eyestudio” is metaphorical for an artist’s (the painter’s) studio. The Chanel ad in Figure 6 features the same foregrounded eyeshadow and a product presentation that reflects the painting metaphor. In another ad for Sally Hansen’s nail polish (Figure 7), three steps for achieving a “salon perfect manicure” are provided: “1) Prep & Treat […] 2) Color [… and] 3) Protect & Maintain[…],” which is reminiscent of painting practice in many ways. Table 1 demonstrates the mapping of WOMEN ARE PAINTINGS.

Figure 5

Maybelline ad

Figure 6

Chanel ad

Figure 7

Sally Hansen ad

Table 1

Mapping of WOMEN ARE PAINTINGS

	Foundation Colors	Tools	Action	Outcome	Agent
Source domain	Body (skin; Cosmetics nails; hair)	Pencils; brushes; hands (palms; fingertips)	Prepare; treat; paint/color	A woman wearing makeup	Woman
Target domain	Canvas Colors	Pencils; brushes	Prepare; treat; paint/color	A finished painting on canvas	Painter

The practice of humans applying make-up dates back to ancient Egypt at least. Ancient as it is, it inspires new visual art. In a TED talk by the visual artist Alexa Meade, she shares her experience of “paint[ing] mesmerizing, illusionistic portraits directly on living subjects, subverting familiar visual cues with perspective and color” (TED 2014). Instead of “paint[ing] on canvas, she applies paint directly to her subjects – the people, as well as the objects surrounding them and the background” (TED 2014).

Some may argue that there are two possible metaphors here: WOMEN ARE PAINTINGS and WOMEN ARE PAINTERS. In this context, we consider only the first one as more probable. This is not only because WOMEN ARE PAINTERS does not belong to the category of object metaphors, as painters are also human beings, but more importantly, the practice of applying make-up is inherently outcome- or product-oriented, just like the practice of painting. The process of painting is aimed at producing a completed painting, and the painter will not stop working until it is completed. The same is true of applying make-up. Women apply make-up because they want to see themselves wearing make-up when the process is completed. They never go out during the process of making-up or if wearing incomplete make-up; instead, they are bothered by fading make-up, and that is why there have emerged waterproof and fade-proof products. It is worth noting that in the WOMEN ARE PAINTERS metaphor, the painting – the painter’s product – is women themselves. This strong product orientation then gives rise to the related WOMEN ARE PAINTINGS metaphor. In essence, women paint themselves (except performance professionals who are often painted by makeup professionals). The French reflexive verb can best express the case: “se peindre,” meaning “paint oneself”.

4.2 ANIMAL metaphors

While flower metaphors for women are often perceived positively mainly because flowers are symbols of beauty, animal metaphors are less so. In fact, the relationship between animals and women is complex. In our sample, there are two kinds of animals constituting the target domain of animal metaphors for women: pets and wild animals. Popular among pets are cats and birds, while wild animals are often lions and leopards. The two should be considered as open categories, as given larger samples and more data in future studies, the list is bound to go on (e.g. WOMEN ARE CHICKS), though the examples here are likely to remain at the top of the list. This section will examine the meanings and realizations of the following animal metaphors: WOMEN ARE CATS, WOMEN ARE BIRDS/BUTTERFLIES, and WOMEN ARE LEOPARDS/LIONS.

4.2.1 Women are cats

WOMEN ARE CATS is a recurring metaphor across the USA edition and the Chinese edition of Cosmo. It is often realized visually, while the use of text is reduced to a minimum. A simple case is a Dior ad for clothing (Figure 8), where the female model puts on a cat look/ gaze, which alone is powerful enough to evoke the “catness” and thus the metaphor WOMEN ARE CATS. In other occurrences, there are more modes deployed to realize the metaphor. For example, in one ad (Figure 9) for a new perfume named Purr by the brand Katy Perry, the cat-loving Katy Perry herself is modeling in a cat costume, including a mask with cat eyes and ears as well as a long tail, and playing with a ball of wool.

Figure 8

Dior ad

Figure 9

Katy Perry ad

The name of the perfume product and the brand also evoke the metaphor CAT (Figure 8) (e.g. “Purr”; “Katy Perry”), which indicates that the product and brand ideology are also driven by the metaphor WOMEN ARE CATS. The metaphorical meaning is also carried by the design of the words. The two “Y”s in “Katy Perry” and the line extending from the “P” in “Purr” to curve around under the word itself are long and curly, resembling the tail of a cat. Furthermore, the bottle of the perfume assumes the shape of a cat, underpinned by the same ideology. The Nina Ricci perfume ad shown in Figure 10 is also illustrative of the cat metaphor realized by multiple modes such as the costume (esp. the faked cat ears) and the look.

Figure 10

Nina Ricci ad

To sum up, on the visual level, the costume, the gesture, the looks, the hands and nails, and the toy of the female model point to the metaphor WOMEN ARE CATS; on the textual level, the product name and the brand name as well as the announcement line all contribute to the mapping process of the metaphor. Figure 11 below summarizes the realization of WOMEN ARE CATS in the Katy Perry ad. It can be seen that the mapping in this ad is realized multimodally, involving a wide range of resources, resulting in a powerful metaphor.

Figure 11

Visual and linguistic realization of WOMEN ARE CATS in the Katy Perry ad

The cat metaphor is so widespread and deep-rooted that “wildcat” becomes a term for a particular type of effect in drawing eye edges/shadows. “Retro cat eyes are this look’s inspiration, but the squared-off shape makes it more modern and playful,” says Pat McGrath, global creative design director for P&G Cosmetics (Cosmopolitan USA 2011-03: 251). The wildcat effect is achieved by the following three steps: 1) lining eyes with pencil liner, taking it half an inch past outer corners; 2) filling lids with black shadow, stopping at the creases; with the liner as a base, brush on a quarter-inch-tall rectangle shape that fades toward the end; 3) brushing on three coats of mascara, then top with lash gloss, which makes lashes pop (Cosmopolitan USA 2011-03: 253).

4.2.2 Women are birds/butterflies

Another animal metaphor found in the sample is WOMEN ARE BIRDS. In an ad for the clothing brand Five Plus (Figure 12), the female model is lying in a gentle place whose shape and structure as well as surroundings resemble a bird’s nest. In particular, a larger-than-usual bird’s egg at the edge of the nest reinforces the identification of the place as a bird’s nest. If the represented narrative in the source domain is “A bird lies in its nest,” the metaphor of WOMEN ARE BIRDS arises when the agent (bird) is replaced (by woman). This metaphor is purely visual, no text is involved. When the mapping takes place, typical traits of birds such as small, gentle, soft, cute, weak, timid, easy to fall prey to predators can be transferred to women. In particular, the white dress of the female model and her sheep-like, gentle look (no direct gaze) strengthens the gentle, soft, weak, timid qualities. Just like the WOMEN ARE FLOWERS metaphor, WOMEN ARE BIRDS is established in many cultures. For instance, the Chinese four-character idiom “小鸟依人” (translation: “as a little bird rests on man”) is often ascribed to desirable women, willing to be close to or even dependent on men, shy, gentle, and sweet.

Figure 12

Five Plus ad

In the case above, it is not indicated which kind of bird women are compared to, but there are cases where the bird is specified and identified. In an ad for Max Mara (Figure 13), the female model is in a dress with rich colors, just like the rich-colored feathers or plumage of the parrots on her shoulders. This resemblance gives rise to the metaphor WOMEN ARE PARROTS, where women’s clothes are compared to the feathers of parrots. In some way, this metaphor also echoes the WOMEN ARE PAINTINGS metaphor in terms of rich colors: the woman’s body is subject to the application of various colors, and when the “work” is completed, the woman becomes a painting.

Figure 13

Max Mara ad

A similar metaphor is WOMEN ARE BUTTERFLIES. The ad for Gucci’s new perfume Flora (Figure 14) depicts a female model in a light, flowing, and flower-patterned dress, which takes the shape of butterfly wings in the air. The background of the ad is the sky, which creates the illusion that the woman is flying, and indeed her uplifted arms seem to show a kind of flying effort but at the same time fit the Gestalt structure by acting as the butterfly’s antenna. The metaphor in this case is realized by agent substitution in the narrative process. In the conventional narrative process “butterfly flies in the sky,” the agent “butterfly” is replaced by “woman,” thus creating the target domain “woman flies in the sky like a butterfly.” Upon a closer look, the part of the flowing dress near the display of the perfume (in the lower-right corner of the page) has among its many flowery patterns one butterfly and the logo of “Flora.” This smart realization not only demonstrates the WOMEN ARE BUTTERFLIES metaphor at a higher level, but also the PERFUME IS DRESS metaphor. In fact, the expression “to wear perfume” is so common that it is hardly regarded as a metaphor.

Figure 14

Gucci ad

4.2.3 Women are leopards

It seems contradictory that women can be compared to sweet, gentle, weak, and timid birds yet at the same time to wild animals, often ferocious and carnivorous, such as leopards and lions. But the WOMEN ARE LEOPARDS/LIONS metaphor is popular. Not only do we see materials patterned with leopard spots in women’s clothes, shoes, and purses, but the once black-and-white Apple iPhones now have a new leopard collection. In our sample, an ad for Vince Camuto shows a female model in leopard-colored shoes and purse (Figure 15), realized in the form of partial substitution, creating a WOMEN ARE LEOPARDS metaphor, which is enhanced by the woman’s gesture of leaning or almost lying against a sandy, rocky surface, which is the ad’s background. The animalization of the woman is more than apparent.

Figure 15

Vince Camuto ad

This issue (Cosmopolitan USA 2011-09) provides two other alternative covers of the magazine and invites interaction with its readers on Twitter by asking them to vote for “Which Sexy Cover is Your Fave?” The three covers use photos of the same model, Dianna Agron, but in different dresses: the first in a pure white dress, the second in leather, and the third in a leopard T-shirt. The magazine labels the three styles as “Elegant sexy,” “Badass sexy,” and “Wild sexy” respectively. This label provides a useful clue for the mapping or transfer of meaning of the metaphor: by comparing women to leopards, it is assumed that the animal’s traits of wildness can be lent to women. The wildness and ferocity entails being fearless and uninhibited on the part of women.

Still another assumption is that men, stereotyped as aggressive, are likely to take pleasure and satisfaction from conquest and taming of the wild. Herbal Essentials, in its ad for a hair smoothing conditioner, deploys an African savannah landscape with a lion walking in the background and foregrounds a female model with long flowing hair, and an announcement line running across the boundary between the female and the background reading “Tame the wild…” (Figure 16). The immediate metaphorical association is that women’s hair is just like the lion’s hair, stubbornly and proudly flowing, which has to be “tamed”/smoothed, and the conditioner comes in for effective assistance in the smoothing process.

Figure 16

Herbal Essentials ad

This WOMEN’S HAIR IS LION’S HAIR metaphor is underpinned by the more ideological WOMEN ARE LIONS metaphor, and the “taming” is mapped. On the one hand, this metaphor describes women as being wild and fearless; on the other, it still believes women are to be tamed and conquered (by men), illustrating that dehumanization and sexist discrimination persists.

5 Conclusion

The previous sections identified and analyzed two types of metaphors that reflect and reproduce a dehumanization ideology: OBJECTS metaphors and ANIMAL metaphors. It can be seen that OBJECT metaphors occur in ads for products such as cosmetics and perfume. Often employed objects are flowers, vases, and paintings, among which paintings seem to stand on a higher level, as they can also occur in flower metaphors: flowers are “painted.” The products and the objects are related in several ways. First, cosmetics can add beauty and rich color to women, and flowers are a conceptual metaphor of beauty and rich colors, thus creating the WOMEN ARE FLOWERS metaphor. Second, cosmetics and perfume make women smell good, and again there are immediate associations between flowers and fragrance, hence the metaphor WOMEN ARE FLOWERS. Third, cosmetics and perfume are applied by way of using pencils, brushes, fingers, and palms to women’s body/ skin, a workable surface, and painting practice on canvas uses the same tools, colors, and even some procedures, evoking a close association between applying make-up and painting, giving rise to the WOMEN ARE PAINTINGS metaphor.

OBJECT metaphors are constructed by visual and linguistic resources including mainly colors, images of flowers, and women wearing make-up, and sometimes explicit linguistic metaphors as well. They are realized more visually than linguistically, and more often by means of part imposition, as cosmetics and perfume are applied to (“imposed” on) women’s body/ skin. Women in such metaphorical discourse are compared to, reduced to, and objectified as things, which is influenced by and in turn reproduces and reconstructs the gender ideology that dehumanizes women. The tendency that objects such as flowers and paintings are viewed positively in most cultures and often evoke positive associations such as beauty, fragrance, and art does not make the metaphor WOMEN ARE OBJECTS stop being a dehumanizing anomaly, contrasted with the far more prevalent personification OBJECTS ARE HUMAN BEINGS.

Compared to OBJECT metaphors, ANIMAL metaphors for women are found not only in ads for cosmetics and perfume, but also in those for clothes. Popular animals range from pets such as cats and birds to wild animals like leopards and lions. The reason why ANIMAL metaphors are found in ads for clothes can be attributed to the similarity between clothes and animal fur. While the WOMEN ARE PETS metaphor often evokes attributes such as being sweet, gentle, weak, timid, and cute, where men’s dominance ideology is obviously at work, the WOMEN ARE WILD ANIMALS metaphor portrays women as being wild and fearless and possibly subject to taming or conquest, also in keeping with men’s dominance ideology.

Despite the different associations, both the PETS metaphor and the WILD ANIMALS metaphor bear strong associations with sexuality; they are only different styles of being sexy, as the Cosmopolitan cover suggests, either sweet sexy or wild sexy. In terms of the visual and linguistic resources used to construct metaphors, ANIMAL metaphors use a wider range of codes. Besides colors and explicit linguistic metaphors, the background landscape and the body language of the female model play important roles in constructing ANIMAL metaphors. The easiest example is the Dior woman, whose mere gaze resembles that of an animal and realizes the metaphor. This means of realization is neither juxtaposition nor substitution or imposition. At best, it may clumsily fit into “substitution” or “imposition” in that the woman’s normal gaze is substituted by an animal’s gaze or an animal’s gaze is imposed upon the woman’s gaze. This extension deserves more research in outlining the mechanism of body language realizing or acting as a metaphor. On top of anything else, the analysis above shows that ANIMAL metaphors require anomalies in women’s posture, gaze, and body language, which, compared to OBJECT metaphors, in which women are only passive and static without altering their body functions, is a more intense process and representation of dehumanization.

In the midst of economic development, industrialization, modernization, and feminist movements, dehumanization of women persists explicitly and implicitly. Metaphors prove to be important conceptual and discursive tools that continue to reflect, reproduce, and reconstruct this dehumanization ideology, even in the advertising discourse of women’s magazines, which is seen as an “ingroup” discourse. The self-reflexivity of metaphors at various levels seems to suggest that the subjects that dehumanize, objectify, and animalize women may include men and women alike. Though admittedly restricted by its small sample, this study outlines a critical metaphorical landscape that goes beyond the warfare metaphor which is popular in various fields (e.g. women, health care, and economy) these days, and highlights the HUMAN BEINGS ARE THINGS metaphors, which are a major instrument in constructing dehumanizing discourse and ideology. Future studies can be directed either to continuing to extend this metaphorical landscape of dehumanization of women or to further investigating the mechanisms of multimodal metaphors, especially in terms of incorporating body language into the conventional image-text network.