The misrepresentation of both men and women in the media more often than not leads to negative effects rather than positive. As I was watching The Super Bowl this year, one commercial specifically caught my eye; Carl Jr.’s ad for their new all-natural burger. The clip opens with Charlotte McKinney, a former Guess model, strutting down a local market, bare naked. It goes on to illustrate Mckinney passing through a public area, filming her walking behind produce shaped similarly to certain body parts of hers. The entire commercial basically uses a woman’s body to sell a sandwich with 44 grams of fat and 760 calories. As I was watching the clip, I couldn’t help but think: was all that really necessary?

The Super Bowl airs countless sexists commercials and in 2012, the viewers began to protest. They decided to use social media in order to start a national conversation and created the #NotBuyingIt hashtag. People began to challenge the media to sell their products without the use of sexism, which I fully support.

One of the more popular consequences of sexism is that it can cause people to feel ashamed of their own bodies. The stunning Charlotte McKinney savoring every bite of a burger can make any woman feel ashamed of herself for not looking similar to the model/actress, contributing to the millions of females and males comparing their bodies to the people plastered across their televisions daily. This brings up unnecessary insecurities. Individuals start to think, “Why don’t I look like that? I eat Carl’s Jr. meals too,” and begin to resent their physical appearance.

Another negative factor is that the media seems to favor men. In The White House Project Benchmarking Women’s Progress Report in 2010, it was recorded that women receive only 22 percent of leadership positions in journalism. Females may be seen on air as anchors or reporters, but offscreen the males seem to run things.

However, I can see how sexism is something that we have learned to ignore. Whenever bias toward a certain gender airs, we have trained ourselves to just roll our eyes and look the other way, but that’s something we need to stop immediately. Try taking your business to restaurants that don’t use half dressed women. Or instead of purchasing a shirt from retail stores that string shirtless men across their walls, save your money for something else.

This failure to act has allowed the media to think they can get away with discriminating against women. If we continue to turn our heads the other way like we do now then nothing will change. Restaurants will continue to use half-dressed women to sell their food. Male musicians will still degrade women in order to make themselves seem superior. And gender equality will carry on as an unreachable goal for our society.