Advertising’s Image of Women – as presented by Jean Kilbourne
Saw this interesting and powerful video on Amanda’s blog where feminist author and filmmaker Jean Kilbourne speaks about the image of women in advertising. This video may be 4 years old, but it sure is still relevant today, showing just how much hasn’t changed in terms of women’s image in the mass media.
Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s image of women
“Advertising tells us who we are and who we should be.” Ads sell concepts that appeal to our senses, so much that we compare our lives to ads, and hope to live up to the standards of those in ads.
An example: I’ve shared this article on Facebook and Twitter before:
5 reasons to skip the diamond engagement ring
I quote from the article:
You’re ready. You have the entire scene planned out in your head, every detail plotted and mapped until it’s perfect. At the climax of this mini-drama, he will bend on one knee and present to you a beautiful diamond ring — or, if you’re the one proposing, you will watch as her expression changes from surprise to utter delight when she sees the ring. And that’s when you’ll know: Yes, you’re getting married.
Or so the diamond industry would like you to believe. The sole purpose of this appealing fantasy is to drum up sales. Once you look past the mythos of the diamond engagement ring, you’ll see that it’s not much more than a shiny rock.
Advertising sells ideals, and we are all suckers for believing that that is how things should be. Why must we conform and let these ‘ideals’ rule our lives?
Back to the video I shared, the speaker says:
[Advertisers] surround us with images of ideal female beauty. So we all learn how important it is for women to be beautiful, and exactly what it takes. Women learn from a very early age that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and above all, money, striving to achieve this ideal, and feeling ashamed and guilty when we fail. And failure is inevitable. Because the ideal is based on absolute flawlessness. … It also influences how men feel about the real women they are with.
But there is a bigger problem.
She also speaks of how the shape of women’s bodies are increasingly used not only in display ads, but also to create objects (objectification of women’s bodies), like this, this, this, this and this. And while it does not directly cause violence, it does portray women as things and objects, and turning a human being into a ‘thing’ is almost always the first step to our justifying violence against that person – we see that person as less than human, and violence becomes inevitable.
So there we have it. Sexism in ads degrade women and make women feel like lesser beings than they really are, by telling them they are not an image of the ideal beauty portrayed in ads, and they may also incite violence against women.
These are only points covered in the first third of the video – Watch the rest. She is a very eloquent speaker; sarcastic, quick witted, and humorous. I very much doubt this will change the way the world’s major organizations advertise in the media, but there are things we can do to stop our daughters from thinking that they need to be a spitting image of the ideal beauty, as portrayed in advertisements, in order to be considered beautiful.
And maybe this will change your idea about who you should be and how you should live your lives too.
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You know, after watching this I did complain to my partner on how pressure to be thin and perfect always brings me down, and how I wish I could simply not feel it. But the he replied something along the lines “as long as other women diet, put on makeup and fashionable clothes, the one that don’t will look un-groomed and unprofessional”.
But then I asked him, how would he feel if he was to date or work with a woman who had his grooming standards – because if she adopted my partners approach to self-image, she would have a slight few extra pounds, occasional stubs of hair on her legs, patchy dry skin that revealed her age, and would go to work in baggy pants and washed-out T-shirt, still thoroughly convinced that her looks don’t really matter, because it’s her intellect that defines her at the workspace and social space.
My partner winced at that, and I felt so sad, that as a woman, I will probably never feel the ease of simply putting the issue of my look on the backseat
. And I don’t know who to blame, or how to fix it. The few of us who are aware of the problem will never change the ad industry or peoples mentality towards how much value is put into a woman’s look.
@AngMoGirl : thanks for your comment! i really like how u asked him about how he would feel if women adopted his grooming standards. it really is unfair, isn’t it, how what men do is accepted by society, but we cannot transpose the same to women and still be accepted. sometimes i wonder: people say women are vain creatures, but is that also product of ads’ influence?
daphnemaia recently blogged… Advertising’s Image of Women – as presented by Jean Kilbourne
[...] towards femininity, or empowerment of female creativity and aesthetics? Few days ago I read this blog post on Daphnemia’s blog (very recommended read!), and it really seriously got me thinking. It’s about how [...]
Very interesting video, and am going to watch the rest of the video. I hope she touches on the ridiculous thing they have in the US, the child beauty pageants where little girls (as young as two) are dolled up to look much older.
It would be interesting to find out how many of these images, ads etc are actually produced or approved by women. I remember the Dove ad, you know the one which features women of all shapes and sizes i.e. real women and not models…I thought it was wonderful. But another woman, who is a lawyer based in Singapore, wrote on her blog, that such ads were ridiculous because who would want to look like these women (even though they are the reality of the world), and that it does not inspire her to buy the product. In other words, ads sell an aspiration, the fantasy of what we all would like to be. I’m not sure if she wants to be like Julia Roberts or Uma Thurman who have been airbrushed to an inch of their lives in ads, and look utterly ridiculous and fake (can’t remember the products though, and that says a lot).
But the irony is that it is the women beauty magazines, that say their purpose is to empower the women, that perpetuate the images of ideal women. They are at the mercy of the advertisers (crucial to survival), and defend the images used. And the sad part of is, the majority of women and girls, rely on them to be “educated” on these things, and would never see Kilbourn’s (or similar) video.
There was a BBC documentary last year on the subject of beauty magazines and the images they use, the influence they have on women and girls, the rise in aneroxia, and problems women and girls have with their self-image, etc. And none of the beauty magazines (Vogue, Cosmopolitan, etc) would speak to the BBC. Which said a lot about their policies, and how convinced they are of them. But unfortunately, the message will not get to the vast majority of women and girls I’m afraid.
Sorry for the long post, but this topic will never go away with one camp for Kilbourne and the other which says that advertisers will change only when the consumers start demanding change(through their wallets). But then you would need informed/thinking consumers wouldn’t you to begin with?
[...] Was looking through my 2010 posts and decided to revisit this post. Daphnemaia wrote an awesome post on it by the way! [...]
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Daphne Maia
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