Analysis Of Jean Kilbourne 's ' Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt ' Essay

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.

Advertising is one of the most popular ways to promote a product. Through advertisement the creators of these products can make millions of dollars, depending on how successful their advertisements are. But are the advertisement selling a product that will help them or are they selling violence and sex? Many ads can influence people in different ways. One of these ways is to show women as objects of rape and sexual abuse. In, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt” Kilbourne talks about how many ads use women and portray them only as sexual beings. Some of these ads can influence violence against women. Kilbourne described violence in ads, “as in pornography, usually power over another, either by physical dominance.” (269). The Dolce & Gabbana

In Jean Kilbourne’s essay, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence, she paints a picture of repression, abuse, and objectification of women. Kilbourne gives an eye-opening view to the way American advertisers portray women and girls. Throughout the essay she has images that depict women in compromising poses. These images are examples of how often we see women in dehumanizing positions in advertisements and how desensitized we have become. Kilbourne implores us to take the media more seriously. She is putting a microscope on society and showing that the objectification of women is acceptable.

In “Two Ways a Woman Can get Hurt: Advertising and Violence,” the author Jean Kilbourne describes how advertising and violence is a big problem for women. Although her piece is a little scrambled, she tries to organize it with different types of advertisement. Women are seen as sex objects when it comes to advertising name brand products. Corporate representatives justify selling and marketing for a product by how a woman looks. Kilbourne explains how the media is a big influence on how men perceive women. Kilbourne tries to prove her point by bashing on advertising agencies and their motives to successfully sell a product. Kilbourne’s affirmation towards advertisements leaves you no doubt that she is against them.

Kilbourne’s support for her argument relies on the Appeal to Authority she makes, citing specific ads of big time companies and businesses to demonstrate how these ads are encouraging sexual aggression and violence. She alleges that ads affect us on an unconscious level stating we’ve become immune to the fact that these ads affect us (417). At the same time, she declares ads are pornographic, since they encourage rape and sexual assault. Kilbourne maintains that all women are vulnerable because “in our culture there is widespread objectification of women’s bodies, glorification of disconnection, violence of women, and blaming of the victim” (433). It all refers back to Kilbourne’s main claim that ads depict individuals as things which encourages sexual hostility.

Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly surrounded by advertisements. On average, we are exposed to approximately 3,000 ads per day, through logos, billboards, and television commercials, even our choices of brands. But in today’s society, one of the most used and influential tools of advertising are women. But the unfortunate thing is that women are not just viewed as actresses in these ads but as objects for people to look at, use, abuse, and more. In her fourth installment in a line of documentaries, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne explains the influence of advertising women and popular culture, and its relationship to gender violence, sexism and racism, and eating disorders.

Advertisements are all over the place. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that you can escape them. They all have their target audience who they have specifically designed the ad for. And of course they are selling their product. This is a multi billion dollar industry and the advertiser’s study all the ways that they can attract the person’s attention. One way that is used the most and is in some ways very controversial is use of sex to sell products

In the article “Two Ways a Women Can Get Hurt,” by Jean Kilbourne she writes about how women in our society are depicted as a sex other than a human. According to Jean, it’s the fact of showing women as objects in the media, which generates most of the violence or mistreatment women experience in our current society. Kilbourne later mentions recognizes that the role given to men and women in advertisement is such a representation of what is a norm “the popular culture idealizes a template for relationships between men and women that is a recipe for disaster: a template that view sex as more important than anything else, that ridicules men who are in control of their women”. Proving that Jean believes that if women are abused today, its only

The documentaries Dream World 3 and Killing Us Softly 4 examine the exploitation of women within the media. The media, such as advertisement and the music video industry, relies heavily on the seductive image of female sexuality. Evident in not only every genre of music, but also every form of advertisement, the videos and advertisements expose and, subsequently sexualize the female body. Such sexualization inevitable leads to

Dominance over woman is also a huge role in violence in advertisements. The dominance over women is brutally shown in this advertising of the women in the diagramed picture. In a society in which violence against women is normalized, this ad is accepted and considered. This means that it has become a normalcy to see a women naked in an advertisement. In places where this ad is shown, millions of women and girls are raped, beaten, and trafficked

Have you ever picked up a magazine and browse through it for five minutes? How many pages do you think you saw in the time you had? Not many. Now, how many women you saw posing in different ways to sell a product? A lot right. From selling a hamburger to a 2016 new car a woman is portray as one more object to sell a product. We see it in newspapers, magazines, on television, the internet and it has reached to the point that wherever you look there’s a sexual advertisement. We live under a lot of advanced technology that nowadays advertising plays a huge role in our society. According to National Domestic Violence statistics state that twenty-four people per minute are victims of some type of violence by an intimate partner in the United States. Jean Kilbourne in her article “Two ways a woman can get hurt: advertising and violence” argues how these advertisements affects us, how we don’t care about it because it is seen as “normal” nowadays and how it impacts us in our daily lives. Emphasizing that its target is to dehumanize and objectify women because nothing material fulfills our needs. All this advertising going around encourages certain ways of acting and leads to misunderstandings, they are harming us more than they are helping us. Meaning that they are teaching and giving false messages to young relationships. Consequently, man and women are being misrepresented as sex symbols and tools by the media. Therefore, how all these advertisements contribute to affect

Sexist ads show that society is dominated by the same masculine values that have controlled the image of women in the media for years. Sexist advertisement reinforces gender stereotypes and roles, or uses sex appeal to sell products, which degrades the overall public perception of women. The idea that sexism is such a rampant problem comes from the stereotypes that are so deeply embedded into today’s society that they almost seem to be socially acceptable, although they are nowhere near politically correct. Images that objectify women seem to be almost a staple in media and advertising: attractive women are plastered all over ads. The images perpetuate an image of the modern woman, a gender stereotype that is reinforced time and time again by the media. These images are accepted as “okay” in advertising, to depict a particular product as sexy or attractive. And if the product is sexy, so shall be the consumer. In the 1970s, groups of women initially took issue with the objectification of women in advertisements and with the limited roles in which these ads showed women. If they weren’t pin-ups, they were delicate

“Sex in advertising is more about disconnection and distance than connection and closeness. It is also more often about power than passion, about violence than violins” (491). Media has developed an abusive view on women, particularly on their bodies and their sexuality. Not only does it judge women on their bodies and sexuality, media also undermines women’s intelligence and glorifies rape and violence. Media has made girls and boys think that it is okay to rape and be violent in a relationships. Media has also formed the idea that sex is the most important thing in a relationship, which is ruining relationships. The article, “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising and Violence,” by Jean Kilbourne examines how women are portrayed in

Sexualizaton and objectification in the advertisements we see and the media we watch has become a very strong issue in our society. With the idea that “sex sells”, consumers don’t even realize that they’re not viewing the advertisements for what they are, but for the women (or men) that are being portrayed in a very erotic way, posed with whatever product they were hired to sell. Many articles have been written so far to challenge and assess this problem, but one written by Jean Kilbourne (1999), “”Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence” holds an extensive amount of authority. Using her personal experience with the subject, as well as studies she has conducted herself on the topic of sexualization, she talks about how the amount of sexualization in advertising affects how society views the culture and products consumers buy. She also notes that because of the quantity and prevalence of these ads, the rate of all forms of sexual assault, specifically rape (mostly towards women of all age), increase, as well as other forms of assault. It is important to examine Kilbourne’s use of rhetorical devices, such as ethos, pathos, and logos, and how effective these devices make her article. This way, it can be examined for its validity and her understanding of her own research. Kilbourne’s article is very effective through her uses of pathos and ethos, but at the same time, it loses its effectiveness through her absence of a counter-argument, as well as a lack

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