| Killing Us Softly | ||||||
| Chapter 12 is based on advertising and public relations. For this chapter we watched a movie that was a speech given by Jean Killborn, advertising researcher, to college students. This was a trilogy of research based on how women are portrayed in advertising. Killborn goes through an abundance of ads and tells how women are effected by what is printed. Most of the print advertising was portraying women as sex objects and breaking them into segments: butt, boobs, waist, or legs. Killborn's highlights of her speech were: how women's self-esteem is effected by ads, the objectivity of wormen, passiveness of girls and women, and how feminine qualities are shown to be weak. To sum it up: Jean Killborn's main point was that women are passive objects stereotyped in advertising; this effects a woman's self-esteem and could create violence (verbal, mental, physical) towards her.
Jean had every good intention to expose this to the world. Her study has been going on since the '70s and correcting "harmful" ads toward women hasn't been altered by bettering it. If anything it has gotten worse. Women are depicted as mostly sexual objects. I do think this medium of media shapes our society and how we base our lives. Jean also brought to attention the male side of advertising; she said that even though men may mostly be photographed with muscles and their shirts off, there are no real lasting consequences for men. I thought that was an interesting thing to say, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it to be true. I was talking to a male classmate and he said that he looks through the Men's Health magazine and doesn't wish that his body looked like that. He said that he just basically shrugged it off and turned the page. Women on the other had would pick a model apart, wishing she had the boobs, the butt, or the figure that she had. A man doesn't wish he had the pecks of the model. This example justifies Jean's statement. |
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| Classwork | ||||||