A Look At The Advertisement

Jean Kilbourne is an advocate for women and is leading a movement to change the way women are viewed in advertising. She opens up the curtains to reveal the hard truth we choose to ignore or even are too obtuse to notice. Women are objectified, materialized, and over-sexualized in order to sell clothes, products, ideas and more. As a woman, I agree with the position Kilbourne presents throughout her documentary Killing Us Softly 4: The Advertising’s Image of Women (2010) and her TEDx Talk The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women (2014.) She demonstrates time and again that these advertisements are dangerous and lead to unrealistic expectations of women.

In our society today a business is not a business without an advertisement. These advertisements advertise what American’s want and desire in their lives. According to Jack Solomon in his essay, “Master’s of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising,” Jack Solomon claims: “Because ours is a highly diverse, pluralistic society, various advertisements may say different things depending on their intended audiences, but in every case they say something about America, about the status of our hopes, fears, desires, and beliefs”(Solomon). Advertisers continue to promote the American dream of what a women’s body should look like. They advertise their products in hopes for consumers to buy them, so they can look like the models pictures in the ads. Behind these ads, advertisers tend to picture flawless unrealistic woman with the help of Photoshop. In our society today to look like a model is an American dream and can be the reasons why we fantasizes and buy these products being advertised. “America’s consumer economy runs on desire, and advertising stokes the engines by transforming common objects;signs of all things that Americans covet most”(Solomon).

For women, advertising exemplifies the ideal female body. According to Kilbourne, young girls are taught from a very early age that they need to spend lots of time and money to achieve this “physical perfection.” But realistically this cannot be achieved. The ideal woman’s body is Caucasian, very skinny, big breasts, no flaws, and pretty much no pores. This cannot be achieved because it is physically impossible to look like this; the illusion comes from the secret world of Photoshop. No woman is beautiful enough so they leave it to technology to create perfection. The supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford!” She knew the realities of Photoshop and body image, and more women and girls need to become aware of this as well.

Jean Kilbourne’s film, Killing Us Softly 4, depicts the way the females are shown in advertisements. She discusses how advertisement sell concepts of normalcy and what it means to be a “male” and a “female.” One of her main arguments focuses on how women aspire to achieve the physical perfection that is portrayed in advertisements but this perfection is actually artificially created through Photoshop and other editing tools. Women in advertisements are often objectified as weak, skinny, and beautiful while men are often portrayed as bigger and stronger. Advertisements utilize the setting, the position of the people in the advertisements, and the products to appeal to the unconscious aspect

We have all seen the pink ribbons. They have become a national, if not international symbol for breast cancer support and awareness. Breast cancer knows neither racial boundaries nor age restrictions. Females of all ages and ethnicities can develop breast cancer and it is the leading most common cancer among women. Calling attention to this often fatal disease is important by supporting its victims, families and friends of victims, as well as raising funds for breast cancer research. Though males are not immune from developing a breast cancer, for the purposes of this paper, this paper will be limited to information relating breast cancer in females.

According to the United States Breast Cancer Statistics (2016), in 2016 there will be an estimated 246,660 newly diagnosed cases of invasive breast cancer and 61,000 of non-invasive breast cancer among women. For this reason, when studying breast cancer based on a large-scale impact, it not only affects the patient themselves but, as well as their families and communities nationwide. Furthermore, many contributing factors lead to this being such a public health issue. Conclusively, there are specific programs, services, and policies that help to assist the contributing factors of such a public health threat. Nevertheless, breast cancer is still an increasing concern in society, and much-needed research is required to be able to detect and treat this disease.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

In the documentary “killing us softly 4”, Jean Kilbourne discusses the toxic environment that leads to the dehumanizing of females. She goes into intense details on how females have been misrepresented in advertisements over the years. She explains that in advertisements, females have been subjected to inhumane ways such as being a product of sexually expressive methods. Even though in recent years men have been subjected to the same media exploit as women, Jean Kilbourne expresses that it is not as half as bad as what women have been going through, and it is now worse than ever. Jean Kilbourne also expresses how Photoshop is the newest tool in promoting women. Using Photoshop as an advertisement tool allow authors to make women look unrealistically slim.

In the documentary, “Killing Us Softly”, Kilbourne mentioned how in all kinds of advertisements, women’s bodies are turned into “objects and things”. Jean believes the objectification of women creates a form of atmosphere in which there is a widespread of impractical expectations and violence against women. There’s always one part of the body that seems to be focus of a women on an ad, breasts is the go to ‘object’ on the body, which is an attention grabber for the

There are many different diseases that terrorize the human race every day. Of all of these sicknesses, one of the most devastating is breast cancer. Breast cancer touches all types of people all over the world each day. It is actually the second most common cancer amongst women in the United States. One in every eight women in the United States has some form of breast cancer and currently, the death rates are higher than any other cancer with the exception of lung cancer. Cancer is defined by the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary as “a malignant tumor of potentially unlimited growth that expands locally by invasion and systemically by metastasis.” Therefore, breast cancer is a disease of

In 2016, the United States spent 190 billion U.S. dollars on advertisements, almost double the amount of money on advertising than the next largest ad market (Statista). These ads advertise a multitude of different products. The ads are exposed to society in many different ways, from the breaks in between songs on the radio, to the ads shown online. Ads are targeted to a specific group of people, usually, the target demographic the brand wants to buy their product. Brands will often use women’s bodies in a sexual way to get people to stop and look at their ads. Over the last few decades, speakers and activists have seen advertisements becoming more sexual and more demeaning towards women. Activist Jean Kilbourne has been analyzing ads and has been bringing awareness to this issue for years through her four documentaries. In her documentary, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne asserts women’s bodies are often dismembered, portrayed with an unattainable, “ideal” body type, and despite advances in the women’s movement, the objectification of women in ads have gotten worse. The two images below illustrate these ideas.

In week ten of our class discussions we were asked to watch a video titled “Killing us Softly” in which Kilbourne discusses how advertisements are programmed into our subconscious minds after being continuously displayed. The movie notes that only a small percentage of an advertisement message is taken in by your conscious mind, the rest will be reworked deep into your subconsciousness (Jhally, 2010). Sadly, a lot of these advertisements carry negative messages that impact the way women view their natural beauty thus lowering their self esteem and resorting to alternative means of getting the “ideal body”.

Everyday we expose ourselves to thousands of advertisements in a wide variety of environments where ever we go; yet, we fail to realize the influence of the implications being sold to us on these advertisements, particularly about women. Advertisements don’t just sell products; they sell this notion that women are less of humans and more of objects, particularly in the sexual sense. It is important to understand that the advertising worlds’ constant sexual objectification of women has led to a change in sexual pathology in our society, by creating a culture that strives to be the unobtainable image of beauty we see on the cover of magazines. Even more specifically it is important to study the multiple influences that advertisements have

One will see a white female with pouting red lips and the very petite body that resembles a thirteen-year-old girl. The extremely artificial women and the heavily photo-shopped pictures in these ad’s create a norm and make those women who look differently, feel insecure of who they are and make them feel as if they are less of a woman, for example they tend to over represent the Caucasian, blonde with bright eyes, white complexion and a petite body. This is an unattainable beauty for most women, which has caused many to develop issues such as eating disorders, depression and the very much talked about these days, anorexia.

Breast cancer is the second leading cancer killer among women, after lung cancer (Breast Cancer , 2014). Cancer is a word that puts fear in many people, especially if they have family members who have either died or survived the disease. No one wants to hear that he or she has been diagnosed with any disease, especially cancer. Many women do not take breast cancer serious until they are diagnosed. Sadly, once diagnosed with this epidemic, a person’s life is altered forever. Breast cancer does not discriminate and can happen to anyone at any age. To prevent this disease, one must take the necessary precautions to lower the risk factors. In fact, there are several local and national events to remind people of breast cancer’s existence. Many