Killing Us Softly

The movie we watched today in class, Killing Us Softly 4, created by Jean Kilbourne, is a shocking documentary about advertising and about the detrimental effects it has on women (young and old) and their self esteem.

Some of the topics Kilbourne mentions are the painfully thin images we see of women themselves who don't even look like that without the aid of photoshop. She features one Ralph Lauren model whose body is re-created to be so tiny that her head is wider than her pelvis, who was later dismissed from her job for being too fat, bringing back into play the "Professional Beauty Qualification (PBQ)" that Naomi Wolf speaks about in The Beauty Myth. She quotes stunning Cindy Crawford as saying, "I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford," then shows two images of her, enhanced and natural. Although undoubtedly beautiful in both, the difference is alarming.

Other models we see, I was intrigued to learn, don't even exist. Lucky Magazine, which in my opinion is a normal, respected women's magazine, ran a photo of a model composed of a few women. Editors selected body parts of each that they liked and used software to mix and match these features to create their ideal woman. On the contrary, she also mentions a German magazine that banned professional models from its publication as editors had grown tired of having to edit the images to look healthy rather than emaciated. Unfortunately, this is newsworthy. In our society, this is not the exception, not the norm as our society has an "obsession with thinness" that is "about cutting girls down to size."

In addition to using overly thin models, Kilbourne also mentions the use of nearly pornographic images to sell products. Some of these include jeans ads, in which the model is naked from the waist down, or a Gucci campaign in which a man is kneeling in front of a woman whose pubic hair has been groomed into the Gucci "G" logo. This actually disgusted me. We've all heard the expression that sex sells, and it seems as though advertisers are taking this seriously. Sexual themes and images were applied to things I've never even thought of as being remotely sexy. A woman's breasts pouring out of her bra are used to sell fishing lines, and a Burger King ad for their seven inch sandwich alludes to oral sex in a glaringly overt way.

However, what I found to be the worst thing that the advertising industry does to women was the dehumanization. "Women's bodies are constantly turned into objects," Kilbourne says. Women's body parts are featured cut up and severed, or a model's ample cleavage and long, smooth legs are featured without a face to go with them. Sometimes, women even literally turn into the products, such as a bottle of alcohol. Kilbourne says, "We see this with racism, we see it with homophobia, we see it with terrorism. It's always the same process. The person is dehumanized and violence becomes inevitable. And that step is already and constantly being taken against women."