Killing us softly 4 - Jean Kilbourne

Jean Kilbourne is an author, speaker and filmmaker who is most commonly known for her work surrounding the subject of women in advertising. She created a series of lectures called 'Killing Us Softly'.

I decided to watch the final and most recent lecture called Killing Us Softly 4. She uses over 160 advertising images and TV commercials to critique advertisings image of women. She shows the viewers familiar images and changes their views so that they are empowered to take action.

She starts by discussing the way people react to these kinds of advertisements, the majority of people think they are not affected by them and simply just ignore them but Kilbourne states that 'the average american is exposed to 3,000 advertisements every single day (...) Only 8% of the ad's message is received by the conscious mind' The rest is left in a part of the brain and is processing and reprocessing and this causes us to be subconsciously affected by the ads.

She then goes on to explain that from a very young age the media surrounds us with images of the 'ideal' of female beauty. For a mainstream example nearly every single girl has owned a Barbie doll at some point in their youth. The Barbie doll is seen as the 'perfect' woman and girls see her as an idol, someone to look up to and someone to base their ideas of body image on.

'Women learn from a very early age that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy and above all money striving to achieve this look and feeling ashamed and guilty when we fail'

When discussing magazine front covers in Killing Us Softly 4 we see that not only one image/woman is generally used on the front cover, severally images or in some cases several women are used to make a collage of the 'perfect' woman, taking aspects of one woman and different aspects of another. Vulnerable teenage girls do not know that this is done and believe that what they see is real and feel that they should too look this way.

Various brands/people have tried to show the truth in post production of images, one being Dove. They created a commercial called 'Evolution' which illustrates that the image is in fact not real but heavily constructed. The commercial is like a time-lapse showing the starting point to the final image and not only is a lot of make up and hair styling used but a lot of photo manipulation too.

As you can see from the image above not only does the model have a significant amount of make up on she also has had the dimensions of her face altered. Her face is slimmer and longer, lips more voluptuous, eyes are larger etc. But who's to say the before-hand image isn't beautiful? I certainly think it is!

At this day in age there is a 'terrible emphasis on physical perfection', girls grow up surrounded by images of women that define the medias view of perfection. They learn early on that they are going to be judged on how they look. We are told that we will only be accepted if we are young, white and thin.

Kilbourne quotes the statements on some of populars cultures advertisements:

'Life is graded on a curve'
'Who knew that by the age of fifteen your skin has already retired'
'The more you subtract, the more you add'
'Our girls are taught to aspire to be nothing (size zero)'

All of these statements show that although the advertisements aren't directly saying things about body image it is more of them creating a subliminal message in the viewers mind.