In a brilliant update of the Killing Us Softly series, Jean Kilbourne explains the dangers of advertisements and how they objectify women. Advertisements intelligently portray women in a sexual and distorted way in order to attract the consumers’ attention. Media sets a standard on how young women view themselves and puts them at risk for developing an eating disorder. Kilbourne’s research has led her to educate those who have fallen victim to achieving the “ideal beauty” that has evolved in today’s society. First, Kilbourne’s research should be praised tremendously for bringing to light the unhealthy impression of true beauty in today’s culture. Kilbourne challenges the audience to reconsider their viewpoints on advertising that is sublime with sexual language. The evolution of advertising and product placement has drastically changed the real meaning of being a woman. According to the movie, every American is exposed to hundreds and thousands of advertisements each day. Furthermore, the picture of an “ideal women” in magazines, commercials, and billboards are a product of numerous computer retouching and cosmetics. Media creates a false and unrealistic sense of how women should be viewing themselves. Instead of being praised for their femininity and prowess, women are turned into objects. This can be detrimental to a society filled with girls that are brainwashed to strive to achieve this unrealistic look of beauty. However, Kilbourne’s statement surprised me when she claimed, “dieting doesn’t work.” Although Kilbourne’s intention with this statement was to encourage young women to accept their bodies, it creates leeway for laziness and obesity. Advertisements at times can be used as inspiration or motivation for those who try to sculpt their own body through fitness and healthy dieting. Dieting in today’s society is often associated with depriving oneself from the food they love. However, dieting is simply eating food in moderation and not splurging excessively. Furthermore, advertisements displaying women who are overly skinny from an eating disorder such as Anorexia, is not helping the current and future generations of women. In fact, companies should advertise women that have dedicated their lives to a healthy diet along with a vigorous routine of fitness and have achieved a healthy and achievable body. Next, media has an overwhelming power over women’s opinion of their own body. Everyday, the media does not have a problem displaying women that are extremely skinny, which may be a product of an eating disorder. Young women begin depriving themselves from food because they view these women on advertisements as acceptable and desirable to society.
Jean Kilbourne’s “Two Way a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising and Violence” is a section of a book titled: “Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising” that was originally published in 1999. It is about the images of women that advertisements illustrate. The central claim or thesis of the document is that: “advertising helps to create a climate in which certain attitudes and values flourish and it plays a role in shaping people’s ideas” (paraphrase). The author wants people by all genders and young children to acknowledge a right attitude towards what is shown in the advertisements so that the standards of behavior will not be influenced. As a result, it enables the negative contribution from the advertisements to be limited or eliminated.
Leah Hardy (2010) argues that models in today’s magazines are no more than works of the digital retouching. Digital retouching is the use of computer program to remove unwanted impurities of the body, making a person look ideal. Digital retouching is sending a negative message to women because it sets up a false sense of what beauty is. It is impossible for women to look like a digital retouch models, because they are not real. In the film, Killing Us Softly 4 Jean Kilbourne argues that advertisement sends out the same type of message to women (Kilbourne, 2010). Kilbourne states “Advertisement tells women that what’s most important is how they look, an advertisement surround us with the image of ideal beauty. However, this flawlessness cannot be achieved. It’s a look that’s been created through airbrushing, cosmetics, and computer retouching ” (Kilbourne, 2010). Women are being told that in order to fit in society, they have to look a certain way, yet it is nearly impossible because the standard is too high.
In this selection by author, Jean Kilbourne the constant escalation in the media advertisements is displayed. She begins the text by explaining the vast blanket that sexualized ads now cover. Kilbourne states that this incredibly out-of-control practice “dehumanizes and objectifies people” (456). She presents the idea that these dangerous ads are so commonplace that it creates a toxic environment in which we base our judgements on staged, indecent ads.
Often in advertising, there are images of women that offend some people, who see them as degrading, while others think they are harmless. However, upon a closer examination of the facts we will find that it is truly demeaning and not just a situation propelled out of proportion by ultra-feminists or what some people term “femi-nazis.” Although it is a feminist issue, it is also a family issue. Everyone has a sister, a mother, a grandmother or female friend who could potentially be harmed by being objectified in these ads. This can incite violence against a woman, damaging the woman as well as her family or friends. In Jean Kilbourne’s “Killing us Softly 3,” Kilbourne advances the idea that the advertising industry makes “. . . deliberate choices,” and “. . . tactical decisions designed to sell their particular brands by selling particular brands of femininity . . . undermining the way girls and women see themselves, while normalizing the violence done to them by men” (mef pp 3). Nevertheless, why do people, including women, still till tend to buy from the stores/retailers who advertise in this fashion? As we attempt to answer this question we will look at the biases created by these ads, and their affect on the people who are looking at them. With this evaluation, we shall discover that it is not just feminists over-reacting, but an issue for all humanity with ramifications for women’s rights, health and safety for years to come.
Thus, we can assume that the audience itself, the members who believe in the content of ads and its sincerity, as well as, people who agree with the portrait of the women that is being created are the only prisoners in this particular situation. “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Plato 868). On the other hand, according to the Jean Kilbourne, author of “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt” what is not mention to the public is the fact, that many women from the very young age during the process of finding out the truth and being blinded by the “light” are fighting with depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders and sexual harassment. “I contend that all girls growing up in this culture are sexually abused – abused by the pornographic images of female sexuality that surround them from birth, abused by all the violence against woman and girls, and abused by the constant harassment and threat of violence” (Kilbourne
In her film “ Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne (2010) delivers a strong wake-up call to the general public who are aware of what is happening with how femininity is being represented in advertising but not realizing fully the impact of the collective image that they give. Kilbourne examines what’s the same and what’s changed from the earlier versions, which illustrate how woman are objectified and presented as sex-objects; a portrayal which, cumulatively and unconsciously, leads a society to think it is acceptable to commit violence against woman. Jean Kilbourne has driven her point home from the first part of her speech shown in the video. To quote: “Ads sell more than products. They sell values, they sell concepts, they sell images of love and sexuality, of success, and perhaps most important, of normalcy. To a great extent they tell us who we are and who we should be (2010).”
Is advertising manipulative; can it be controlling, or is it fueling the demand of the American economy? The exhaustive battle of what advertising is and what it’s not is never-ending and both ends of the spectrum can only battle with statistics, words, and opinions on the fact of the matter. Many arguments have arisen since the establishment of the advertising industry and everyone sheds their own light on the subject. In “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising,” Jean Kilbourne argues that the advertising industry portrayal of women is narrow-minded and produces emotional and psychological problems within women in regards with their roles in society, their physical appearance, and sexual attitudes. She also emphasizes how the world of advertising creates artificiality among women. On another note, the author of “What Advertisement Isn’t,” John O’Toole, takes a look at how the government has too much control of and poorly regulates advertising, how it is not deceptive on a subconscious level, and how advertising is a sales tool and should not be evaluated by journalistic or any other standards. These two arguments talk about issues in advertising that interconnect on broader levels but essentially are speaking of two different levels of advertisements.
Among women in the U.S., is a constant reminder with the underlying message being “be skinny or die trying”. There is a plethora of diet plans, pills, and meals, and women seem to get the idea that they need to change some sort of physical attribute about their body. Most grown women are aware of anorexia and the effects it can have on the body. Nonetheless, the problem lies within the four walls of the women’s homes. Contained by those walls are the daughters of the women, and they, unlike their mothers’ don’t understand the actual effects of not eating enough. All the young teens understand is that they are not as skinny as the other girls they are surrounded by on a daily basis. –Research shows that by the age of 7, many children have already decided that it isn’t okay to be fat. – The datum that it has already crossed the minds of seven year old girls to want to be thinner, should be an automatic red flat to the media, and society, to tone down the signals they are sending young girls in America. -69% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of a perfect body shape.- Social media and other forms of media cause more problems with anorexia than people assume. In a particular instance, the clothing store, Urban Outf...
In regard to Susan Bordo’s, “Never Just Pictures”, I agree with the points she makes in her essay about what is being projected through advertisements and fashion modeling and the negative effects that these have on developing a healthy self-esteem and body image. Everyone, without gender as a factor, should openly embrace the good points of their body, flaws included. But still, we are surrounded by everything from commercials about diet pills, to articles on celebrities who are doing anything to become thinner and thinner, and the bizarre concept that a plus-size model is as small as a size 6 or 8. The saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” rings very true to the emphasis put on what is seen when someone looks at an advertisement for something because it acknowledges something much deeper than the image that is seen. Besides the company selling the product that is shown, they are in some ways, sending subliminal messages of what a person who would buy or wear the product should look and act like. Even though advertisers and the media would be quick to deny that their work has anything to do with young women turning to eating disorders to look like what they see all around them, it is evident that this obsession with self-image and being as thin as humanly possible is clearly a result from none other than what is depicted in those very ads.
In “Still Killing Us Softly,” Jean Kilbourne points out that advertising and media are partly responsible for the behaviors and attitudes expected of women.
The health of women is being abused and harmed because they are either not eating or throwing up what they eat to remain thin. The increasing number of women that are either bulimic or anorexic is growing out of control. Research that has been done shows that one percent of female adolescents have anorexia, and one and a tenth to four and two tenths of women will get bulimia in their lifetime (“Eating Disorders”). The increasing causes more women to believe they need to be skinny like everyone else. Society has changed how women look from being healthy and curvy t...
...s article, “Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence”, Kilbourne talks about advertising and media, but not really advertising and body image. She looks at a lot of real world instances with body image in the media.
The documentary Killing Us Softly 4 discusses and examines the role of women in advertisements and the effects of the ads throughout history. The film begins by inspecting a variety of old ads. The speaker, Jean Kilbourne, then discusses and dissects each ad describing the messages of the advertisements and the subliminal meanings they evoke. The commercials from the past and now differ in some respects but they still suggest the same messages. These messages include but are not limited to the following: women are sexual objects, physical appearance is everything, and women are naturally inferior then men. Kilbourne discusses that because individuals are surrounded by media and advertisements everywhere they go, that these messages become real attitudes and mindsets in men and women. Women believe they must achieve a level of beauty similar to models they see in magazines and television commercials. On the other hand, men expect real women to have the same characteristics and look as beautiful as the women pictured in ads. However, even though women may diet and exercise, the reality...
To sum up, it is often said that advertising is shaping women gender identity, and some have been argued that the statement is true, because of the higher amount of sexual references of women that advertisement show and the damages that occur on women’s personality and the public negative opinions of those women. As well, the negative effects that those kinds of advertisements cause to young generations and make them feel like they should simulate such things and are proud of what they are doing because famous actors are posting their pictures that way. Others deem this case as a personal freedom and absolutely unrelated to shaping women gender identity. On the contrast, they believe that, those sorts of advertisements are seriously teaching women how to stay healthy and be attractive, so they might have self-satisfaction after all.
...r young, impressionable mind will have been exposed to more than 77,000 advertisements, according to an international study. Last week, it confirmed the link between the images of female perfection that dominate the media and increasing cases of low self-esteem among young women..” (Shields,2007). The propaganda techniques such as liking, sex appeal, and celebrity endorsements are used in advertisements constantly. Commercials on television, billboards, magazines, and various other advertisement types are everywhere you look in America, and sadly it has become very important for women of all ages to try to be perfect. We come into contact with these messages every day, and the beauty industry is getting bigger and bigger. Propaganda has molded our worldly perception of beauty and will only continue to hurt us and gain from our lack of self-esteem if we allow it to.