Rhetorical Analysis Of Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt '

Rhetoricians have the canning ability to make persuasive speeches, like Martin Luther King, Jr., influenced his audience with pathos to target the morality and social injustices blacks faced in American society during the 1960s. An individual is persuaded by marketing institutions into taking positions on a plethora of issues ranging from social activism to preferences on particular corporate products. A profuse amount of persuasion relies on rhetoric, or the targeting of discourse communities in hopes of undermining, strengthening, forging, or influencing a community’s ideology, actions, and emotions regarding a particular issue. Equivalent to Martin Luther King Jr., Jean Kilbourne, the author of “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising

Longaker and Walker identify how dehumanization effects emotion by discussing, “The Nazi pogrom, Jews were often made to do disgusting things—scrub toilets, relieve themselves publicly—to make them seem less than human and more deserving of cruel treatment and even mass extermination” (212). Similarly, advertisements can dehumanize individuals, like women, by portraying them in grotesque situations or environments. As a result, a society lessens respect for these individuals and creates a mentality that fosters abuse. Kilbourne tries to illuminate this issue by presenting various advertisements that are suggestive of women, and elaborates on the effects these advertisements have on society. For instance, alcohol companies tend to target women with advertisements like, “A chilling newspaper ad for a bar in Georgetown features a close-up of a cocktail and the headline, ‘If your date won’t listen to reason, try a Velvet Hammer’” (Kilbourne 171). This headline inherently promotes the use of alcohol to force women to commit sexual favors that are not consensual. Indeed, this advertisement can be labeled as crude and even loosely compared to the promotional use of date rape drugs like roofies. By dehumanizing another individual or society, certain individuals believe using drugs are an acceptable means to obtain sexual favors against their will. Kilbourne uses examples, as

Diabolê uses both the looming effect and pathemata to elicit strong emotional responses to a particular issue. Kilbourne uses a Calvin Klein advertisement of a boy who, “Stands in what seems to be a finished basement. A male voiceover tells him he has a great body and asks him to take off his shirt. The boy seems embarrassed but complies” (176). The advertisement is diabolê because Kilbourne detracts from the main topic at hand, in how women are hurt by advertisements and the resulting violence. Kilbourne uses an advertisement based on children, to bring more attention to her argument. Though, the use of children is a clear example of pathemata, because the advertisement is designed to be interpreted by the audience as child pornography. As a result, audience members who are parents instantly sympathize and express a sense of protection for their children or others. In addition, the advertisement uses looming phenomena to channel the audience’s emotions past a deliberative phase and directly into a behavioral or emotional response. Arguments that utilize diabolê need both pathemata and looming phenomena to swiftly evoke responses within the audience, without ever questioning the relation to the main idea. In addition, elements of diabolê are intended to attract strong emotions that are specifically targeted. In this case, children are easily targetable, because parents have an