Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women (A Reaction Paper)
(If you want to watch it's about this video)
The fashion industry has been built around making people wanting to look good for others and for themselves, but in the advent of advertisement people have been taking dangerous views on how beauty should be seen worldwide. Ever since time immemorial people would always strive to look perfect: have slimmer waistlines, bigger busts, flawless skin, and perfect hair that falls into place. But in reality, why is that these “standards” became so called? Why do people strive to look particularly glazed and unhealthy just to be called “beautiful”? Who has set these physical guidelines that made people think that to be successful in life you have to look like people we see in magazines, not really fully registering that everything is posed to give a sense of reality to physical perfection when in fact it cannot be achieved even by the actual models themselves? And people purposefully trying to be seductive in order to sell something: is this all just a fad that we have gotten ourselves into, found it worked, and never let go? Why has sex become such a huge selling point, even for things that are not directly related to it?
In the video [Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women] with Jean Kilbourne delivers a strong wake-up call to the general public who are aware of what is happening with how feminity is being represented in advertising but not realizing fully the impact of the collective image that they give. Sex and in particular the “perfect female body” is extensively used to sell different products to the market, to grab attention, and in its roots to create a social stir that it may be talked about and rehashed and therefore reach more ears. Immoral and unacceptable as it may seem to some, sex information does grab attention. Sex evokes a hardwired emotional response that is linked to species survival. We can’t help our eyes and ears are drawn to it because emotional information has a way of piercing our perceptual fields by rising above other environmental information trying to get our attention (Reichert, 2009). It is easier to blame the advertising firms about the twisted image the female sensuality has been given, but we must take into consideration that most of the time advertising agencies are only told what they must do, and often they interpret how the company stands in the market and then translate how the companies wanted to be seen into advertisements. A lot of people tend to forget that it is not always the ad but the company’s image that makes up the content of what we see in ads.
Advertisers need to do a better job portraying women not only in sexual ads but in all advertising. Essentially feminists have argued that decorative images of women-women shown as one-dimensional objects merely present to look good-influence people’s attitudes and perceptions about women’s contributions and roles in society. One ad won’t do it, but who sees just one ad? We see thousands of them every day. Over time, and unannounced, sexist attitudes work their way into our belief system (Reichert, 2009).
In its attempts to sell merchandise and services, advertising often represents women’s bodies as sexual objects. It’s an age-old technique. It’s time-worn, too. The sexual objectification of women in advertisements conditions girls and women to view themselves as objects-a phenomenon called self-objectification. This way of viewing one’s own body can lead to shame, disgust, and appearance anxiety, which in turn can contribute to eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, and depression. Self-objectification appears to be activated more readily by print media such as fashion magazines, in which large numbers of objectified images of women appear in advertisements than by television (Roberts and Gettman, 2004). In her lecture Kilbourne shown numerous examples of how a lot of images that we actually see in print are photo shopped in some way or another that it’s very hard to believe anything we see anymore. Some examples she cited were how Jessica Alba was given a smaller waist, Keira Knightley was given a larger bust, and Kate Winslett being made dramatically thinner through Liquefy and Clone effects in Photoshop. Even Cindy Crawford highlights the impossibility of how the industry sometimes works by saying that she wished she “looked like Cindy Crawford”.
Advertising for fashion and beauty industries relies on making consumers feel that they just aren’t attractive or sexy enough. The ideal female body (whoever pegged the term and the standards is either seriously questionable or extremely frustrated) is ultra-thin, young, and without wrinkle, cellulite, or blemish-an ideal no woman can attain. And yet advertisements tell women repeatedly that if they use all the products that they have to offer then maybe, just maybe, they can be one step closer in achieving this so called “ideal” …even if, as one person on YouTube commented in the video of [Killing Us Softly], it “still doesn't change the fact that the model is probably substantially under her BMI”. It is likely no coincidence that as eating disorder rates have climbed in the recent years, the media’s body ideal for women has become thinner and thinner. Although many factors contribute to eating disorders, for some women and girls the media’s ultra-thin body ideal is a strong influence. And these eating disorders are affecting boys and men as well, although whether mediated messages contribute to this problem is unclear.
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”. The media is a powerful tool that in the wrong hands can be very dangerous and destructive. Media and its components must always be fully aware of the role it plays in society, for it really has the power to change the world for the good or for the worse if it so chooses. It gives us the message. Now, it is our job to respond with responsibility. And in turn, know our rightful place in society without being hampered by stereotypes.
Though there is the understandable need to promote the products in such a way as they can be remembered and sold successfully, people need not be bounded by what they see in media and learn to think beyond the advertisements. Although in a positive note these kind of advertisements can be used as motivation for people to strive better in making themselves look and feel good (though still influenced but stereotypes in some point, but this is at best culturally unavoidable), media also needs to depict bodies in a range of shapes, sized ages, and physical capabilities. Let’s replace the thin, youthful, sexy ideal in advertisements with images of real women: muscular athletes, women in wheelchairs, breast cancer survivors, women over the age of fifty. Let us believe there is more to women and girls than the sex objects and stereotypes that we often see in advertising. And then let us insist that advertisers believe it, too.