Comparing Kilbourne's 'Please, You Re Driving Me Wild'

Authors use various techniques when attempting to persuade an audience. Some use rhetoric, while others use organizational patterns. In Kilbourne’s “Please, Please, You’re Driving Me Wild”, she uses both techniques to persuade her audience that fast food and junk food advertisements plays a very significant important role in women’s’ lives. Food advertisements should not be used to trick us into thinking that food can love us, fulfill us, or satisfy us emotionally. Kilbourne does a successful job of giving examples and everyday situations to aid in getting her message across without pushing it down the audience’s throat. Such techniques as rhetoric, helped her achieve this goal. For example, while Kilbourne was discussing how sex sells, she

As a result of this emotion, women feel the need to diet. Kilbourne discusses how the dieting industry and the food industry need each other to survive. A woman feels uncertain and doubtful about her body image. Therefore, she turns to dieting. While dieting, she sees an advertisement for low-calorie food with artificial sweeteners. Instead of eating healthy, she turns to the low-fat snack. The woman has now fallen off the wagon and abandoned her diet. However, she sees another junk food commercial that makes her feel insecure and starts her diet program again. Without the junk food industry there would be no dieting industry and without the dieting industry the junk food industry would lose money. Kilbourne uses this logic to state that junk food companies need to advertise “thin” and the “perfect body” to make the average woman feel insure about her body image, which prompts her to start dieting. This was a successful persuasion technique because she reveals the logic behind the food company’s advertisement behind showing attractive and thin people to make women feel unsatisfied. Also, Kilbourne inserts some more knowledge by stating that if we practiced eating healthy foods, staying away from the low-calorie, low-fat, and artificial sugars, and stayed physically active, we would understand that bodies come in different