Activity #7 - Killing Us Softly

“Killing Us Softly”

In “Killing Us Softly 3”, Jane Kilbourne discusses the affects of media on society. The average American sees 3,000 advertisements a day. With this kind of statistics it is impossible for anyone not to be affected by media. Advertisements sell much more than products; they sell values, standards, normalcy, images of ideal love, and sexuality. According to these images women’s main aspects are their physical appearances. Women should spend time, energy, and enormous amounts of money to succeed at obtaining the ideal look. It’s an impossible task however because the ideal image of women is to be flawless. This image can cause terrible repercussions on women. Advertising can be linked to the increases in eating disorders, teen pregnancies, and women battering. With the way that advertising can modify the human perspective it has the ability to take away our chance at an authentic, free life.

With the “onslaught” video, Dove shows clips of popular advertisements that either promote women’s beauty products or use women in provocative ways in order to sell other objects. It then jumps to images of plastic surgery, and then lastly to a small, elementary student. The ad ends with the message “take your daughter before the beauty industry does”. The media starts to distort our images of beauty as soon as children are able to absorb the images. It’s important to recognize the issues that advertising can play in women’s lives and to address it by saving out youth from falling into the beauty traps. It’s important to not let little girls’ self-esteem be destroyed by the media nor to let them start idolizing the ideal women images. “Evolution” displayed the steps to creating a beauty add. The original girl was transformed through makeup, hair styling, and finally computer graphics in order to make the “model”. Basically it is no wonder why the image of an ideal woman is so distorted in the mindset of society. The advertising agents don’t even have a picture of an actually woman by the end of the process.

This ad is using a seductively dressed woman on a bed to sell a video game. The caption reads “Keep on dreaming of a better world”. While this statement first addresses the notion that the image of the woman is ideal and fake, it also expresses the notion that women of reality are below par in comparison to these advertisement fantasy women. Even in the video game world women should be perfect and fit the ideal description of thin, toned bodies, with beautiful faces and flawless makeup. Basically femininity is beauty and sexuality.

I find the way that media controls the image of women to be quite frightening. The amounts of eating disorders and psychological problems caused by these ideal images are astounding. It doesn’t seem logical that this sort of media mind warp would be able to survive this long. Hopefully with the help of the Dove campaign to advertise realistic women, the image and definition of beauty will start to change. Beauty is about being healthy and happy with one’s body not necessarily skinny and drenched in cosmetics.