Jean Kiilbourne: The Objectification Of Women In Today's Society

Killing Us Softly In today’s society, according to Jean Kilbourne, equality between men and women seem to be almost non-existent. As shown in Kilbourne’s talk series, it is widely believed that this is a man’s world, which had valid points. We are so used to seeing degrading images every day and degrading images of women that we simply overlook these things, which becomes normal in our lives. Advertising agencies surround us with this stuff day in and day out. Also seen in advertisements is sex portrayals which not uncommon to find. “Linking sex with violence in the most dangerous in ads” (Kilbourne). The objectification of women in our society is more established than many would like to believe. Women being portrayed as passive, easy,

Advertisers sell their products in a that objects women, because it catches the attention of a male consumer, but it also charms the female consumer because it can make her look like the ideal figure of a perfect woman. The irony in this idea is that the “perfect women” or the ideal woman with the unblemished skin, perfect figure and perfect hair does not exist. Kilbourne also stated in her talk series that “women learn from an early age that they have to have a perfect figure. I personally do not think it is possible for a woman to possess all the perfect characteristics and features at the same time. All throughout different kinds of advertisements on television, magazines, etc., our culture has been molded to believe that there is a such thing as a perfect woman which is nearly impossible to become no matter how hard one tries. One thing that Kilbourne did bring to my attention that I had no idea about was that advertisement companies will take parts of about four to five women on a computer and make a result of a perfect figure. Advertising agencies continue to participate in the perverted thinking that is distributed throughout our culture by portraying women as the non-existent perfect woman. I also found it interesting that advertisers typically use sex in the form of a woman, specifically her body and if a man is not in the same image, the

Violence against women, objectification of women including their body parts, and segregation of women as the weaker sex is used as a marketing scheme. This is simply designed to get our attention by shocking people and by developing unconscious anxiety. Both solutions are ultimately putting a concrete version of this inequality into our culture. Kilbourne mentioned in her talk series that we are exposed to hundreds and thousands of advertisements on a daily basis, if the majority of these advertisements somehow objectify women then we, as a society, become numb to the actuality of this problem and think nothing of these womanizing images. This is not to say that men are never objectified in advertisement because they too are captured with a woman concentrating on a certain body parts rather than the man himself. These images might be funny to see at first glance but either way there is no right in objectifying any human being. We, as consumers, buy these products because we believe in the messages these products, in essence, send off. We become obsessed with turning our bodies into the body of the bikini model on the cover