Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women

571 Words3 Pages
In this video, Jean Kilbourne talks about how media advertise, in a distorted and destructively way, the image of women around the world. Along with her speech, she shows different prints collected through all these years, in which she exposes how the image of women has been degenerate to a point where sex is mixed with violence. When people ask Jean if things got any better after about forty years she has talking about this problem, she says that things are getting worse. Jean continues her speech with interesting information that most people don’t know: The average American is exposed to over three thousand (3,000) ads every single day. Advertising is more sophisticated and more influential than ever before. Ads are everywhere and sell more than products; they sell values, they sell images, they sell concepts of love and sexuality, they sell success, but the most important, they sell us who we are and who we should be. But what does advertising tell us about women? It tells us that the most important is how they look. First thing advertising do is to surround them with the image of ideal female beauty, and women from very young ages strive to achieve this look, and feel ashamed or guilty when they fail. The reason, as Jean explains, why most of the people believe they are not influenced by advertising is because its influence is quick, it is cumulative, and for the most part, it is subconscious. According to Rance Crain, former senior editor of Advertising Age, “only 8% of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind. The rest is worked and reworked deep within the recesses of the brain.” The most impressive part of the speech to me is when Jean shows a photo retoucher taking different anatomy parts of different women to create a perfect woman, who of course, doesn’t exist; and the most impressive of these “creations” is that these unreal women are covers
Open Document