The Impact Of Advertising On Women And Showing The Negative Prospects Of Society

In the documentary Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women by Jean Kilbourne, she talks about how women are depicted in advertisement. The average American will spend 2 years of their life just watching advertisement, and most of these people will make the claim that the ads were not effective to them. Jean Kilbourne stresses that the advertisement companies make their ads quick and cumulative so that they almost seem forgettable. However, the advertisements will still resonate in your mind unconsciously. Kilbourne argues that the objectification of women in the advertisement industry: negatively affects the mental health of women with the societal need to be perfect, encourages the eroticism of violence, and tells women they need

Today's media is increasingly pornographic, and the notion that 'sex sells' has infiltrated the advertising of virtually all products and services. Both men and women are sexualized in contemporary media, but the extent to which women are sexualized is far greater that men are. Jean Kilbourne states in her talk, The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women, "There are stereotypes that harm men, of course, but they tend to be less personal, less related to the body." The stereotypes that drive the portrayal of women in the media lead to the repeated objectification, particularly sexual objectification,

Many people would argue that they personally feel exempt from the influences of advertising. But if this is the case, then why is the advertising industry grossing over $250 billion a year? The American living in the United States is typically exposed to over 3,00 advertisements in a single day, which means that he or she will spend two years of their lives watching television commercials. Advertisements are everywhere and we cannot avoid them. We see advertisements in schools, buildings, billboards, airplanes, bust stops, and so on. Not only are advertisements selling advertisements, but they’re selling values and beliefs, sexuality, images, and the normalcy of believing who we should be because an advertisement said so. Advertisements can create environments, but sometimes these environments can become toxic when consumers buy into its toxicity. One of the biggest toxicities of advertisements is the portrayal of women in advertisements. Though standards of beauty vary over time and by cultures, it seems as though the advertising industry is still buying into “the beauty myth.” This is notion that “the quality of beauty objectively and universally exists.” Though there have been strides to break this notion and attack how advertising has objectified women, it seems as though advertisements are objectifying women more and more. In most advertisements, we are not seeing women being depicted as who they really are, but being portrayed and objectified to be someone that they

These roles for females represent what the advertisement industry believe buyers deem as the real world. As Goffman asked," What messages about women have been given to society through magazine

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

In Jean Kilbourne’s article “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence, Kilbourne first states that she believes that advertising companies dehumanize and objectify humans, (i.e. woman) through sex, power, violence, and nudity. Throughout Kilbourne’s article she specifies/elaborates her assumptions with facts, pictures, stories, and even our everyday-to-day experiences in our communities. At the beginning of Jean Kilbourne’s article, she claims that woman tend to be more dehumanized or seen as objects based on the ads that certain advertising companies share with our communities. For example, Kilbourne briefly discusses that appealing ads tend to have woman in either poses/postures that are sex related, include pornography, or

What do you see when you look in the mirror? Do you like what you see? In Jean Kilbourne’s article, “Two Ways a Woman Can Hurt,” she discusses the sexualization of women in advertising and how it plays a role in violence against women. Elline Lipkin discusses the causes and effects of negative body images in her article, “Girls’ Bodies, Girls’ Selves.” Although I agree with Kilbourne that advertising and violence can be related, it is important to consider Lipkin’s argument about how advertising shapes body image in a negative way because while a lot of women experience violence, everyone experiences the effects that advertisements have on body image.

Advertisements we see it all the time, some of them we ignore and some it gets our attention. Advertisements have many different pictures from food, people, clothing, cars and they are located everywhere in order to sell their product. But what if I told you that they have hidden messages projected throw them in many ways, and that we do not see it right of way. When it comes to advertisement in magazine and commercials, men are often portray as strong and big showing the image of power, but in the other hand women for a very long time have been portray in different ways as weak or a toy for sexual advertisement. In addition Kilbourne mention in her video “Killing us softy 4” they advertise images that show violence, sexuality and health issues.

In this week’s lecture on culture and media, I learned to identify issues in our society that is usually overlooked. The TED talk, “Killing Us Softly,” by Jean Killbourne, taught us how advertisers began to change the public’s views as they began to overly sexualize women and objectify them in various advertisements. The difference in the way men and women were portrayed were extremely different and is now being continued into the present, while being accepted as a current norm.

In the video “Killing Us Softly”, Jean Kilbourne explains how ads portray women in our world. Women are portrayed as fragile, more vulnerable, and less powerful. Ads are photoshopped to make their bodies the “ideal image” of what women should look like. Ads promote sexual and unhealthy images of women. The pictures are photoshopped making the models body shape and skin color completely different to what her actual body looks like. It changes her face to look more appealing, body shape thinner, white or light skinned, and bigger breasts. Ads also create a climate for violence against women. Ads portray men as strong, big, and more powerful. Men don’t live in a world where their bodies are criticized and judged every day. Men are less likely

In her fourth installment of “Killing Us Softly”, Jean Kilbourne explores the image of women that American advertising industries have created in our society. Kilbourne breaks down the trends that advertisements constantly reinforce for women throughout the decades, and criticizes the impossible standards that women are shamed into trying to achieve. She allows us to take a deeper look at the exploitative, sexist, and misogynistic tendencies embedded in commercial culture, which is presented everywhere we look. Proceeding to emphasize that these ads have damaging effects in the real world, leading to violence against women, eating disorders, and low self esteem. Furthermore, Kilbourne acknowledges that although things have changed through the

The Killing Us Softly series by Jean Kilbourne brings to light the portrayal of women in advertisements and analyzes how the female body undergoes constant scrutiny and objectification. The documentary further examines how women are still confined within age-old gender roles thus exposing them to be the weaker sex. In the fourth part of the series, Kilbourne discusses these issues through ads and images she collected and provides her thoughts on the effects of such demeaning advertising.

Next I am going to talk about advertising focused on gender roles as a form of negative media. For women, the media is always focused on how they look. It constantly degrades women’s self esteem by telling them to be skinny, vulnerable, powerless, and silenced. In addition, the media turns women into objects or things instead of beings, which encourages violence towards them. This teaches women it is okay for people to use them. Men are also negatively impacted by the media as they are scrutinized for having feminine qualities such as compassion, nurturance, cooperation, empathy, sensitivity, and good communication skills. Men are told they must be violent, brutal, and ruthless, especially towards women. The media’s perspective on what it means

In this chapter, Kim Sheehan explores the different ways in which men and women are depicted in advertising, as well as how the two genders view advertising and its message. According to Sheehan, the different portrayals of men and women have intended and unintended effects (Sheehan: 2004, 25) on society and on the roles which men and women practice in the modern world. Such effects, identified by Sheehan, influence the public sphere, persuading individuals that this is an accurate representation of gender roles. Sheehan’s aim, though, is not to resolve this problem of gender inequality in advertising and in society as a whole, or propose solutions, but simply to introduce the different societal roles of men and women portrayed through advertising, as well as how they have changed, and examine the problems surrounding this. The attention paid to this topic here is thus a way of highlighting its importance.

Also, Natalie MacKay and Katherine Covell in their article titled, “The Impact of Women in Advertisements on Attitudes Toward Women”, say that, “daily, we are exposed to printed advertisements in magazines, in newspapers, on billboards, in bus shelters and so forth” (Covell, MacKay 573-574). The ads are everywhere, you can’t get away from them and with all of these ads exploiting our emotions and attacking the very things that advertisers know will get out attention such as, love and relationships, they easily get away with it because they use what makes us vulnerable. It is also said in “Killing Us Softly 4” that, “almost every aspect of popular culture is really all about marketing”. With Americans seeing thousands of ads a day and all of them attacking some part of our being and emotions it’s easy for us to not even notice that there is damage being done. This is where the advertising companies excel because they know that no one is going to see a commercial for a car as being a harmful attribute to our sexual relationships or a video of a hurt animal affecting our emotions into buying animals. It’s all a game that advertisers play, a game that they are winning, as Jean Kilbourne says, “to a great extent they tell us who we are, and who we should be” (Killing Us Softly 4). They have this subtle yet deadly power over us that’s strong enough to change our own self and most importantly, the relationships we have or will