Social responsibility of advertising and female beauty: A document analysis of laws and regulations in Brazil and Portugal

Abstract

This work sought to verify - from an exploratory, intuitive, and empirical view -, how advertising has been regulated in Brazil and Portugal in a non-exhaustive way, observing laws and regulatory guidelines that already exist in these countries and those that are in process, checking its social responsibility in the face of the representativeness and diversity of female beauty. Through qualitative Document Analysis, highlighting the main public documents online found in recent reports, newspapers, official government websites, blogs, and social media, an attempt was made to observe and compare these countries that are historically and culturally linked, differing in cultural, social, political and economic matters. Therefore, in Brazil, there are already some norms to indicate the use of image editing and guidelines to avoid stereotyping of female beauty in advertising. In Portugal, there are already amendments to the advertising code to make beauty standards real and ensure the principle of veracity with the consumer. Both countries already have similar protective laws regarding the “non-objectification” of the woman's body in advertising. However, it was observed that despite the existence of these progresses, there is still a long way to change the deconstruction of the collective imagination about the aesthetic pressure on the female body. Brands/companies need to be aware of these laws/norms and apply them in practice, as well as the need to apply an educational form of awareness for society in general, aiming to be more aligned in the search for more responsible advertising directed to women and for all.