The article, “Two Ways to Hurt a Women: Advertising and Violence” is written by Jean Kilbourne, who is an award-winning author and educator. Kilbourne is best known for her works about the portrayal of women in advertisements. Throughout the article, Kilbourne explains how advertisement objectifies and dehumanizes women and indirectly led to create a culture of violence towards women. The purpose of Kilbourne’s article was to educate and bring awareness behind the “double meaning” of these ads that are meant to be degrading towards women. The audience for this article is both men and women. While ads do target and encourage men to be dominant over women, Kilbourne aims to bring awareness to both genders of the harm such advertisements are causing …show more content…
She states, “These days some ads do feature clothed and often aggressive women with nude men. And women sometimes blatantly objectify men” (499). She then goes onto provide an example of such instance. “‘She’s reading Nietzsche,’ Harris noted to himself as he walked towards the café car for a glass of cabernet. And as he passed her seat, Maureen looked up from her book and thought, ‘Nice buns’” by acknowledging men can be objectified too she is adding and strengthening her main argument. However, when she declares finding the ad “funny” it may confuse her audience and diminish her overall point slightly. Although she quickly rectifies that by pointing out objectification of all sorts is wrong. Adding to her argument, Kilbourne claims while the objectification of men do exist, there is not a history of violence towards them by the opposite gender. Neither are men to be “living in a state of terror” as do many women. In her article, Kilbourne reports a 1998 study by the federal government. According to the study, “One in five of us has been the victim of rape or attempted rape, most often before our seventeenth birthday (…) In fact, three of four women in the study who reported that they had been raped or assaulted as adults” (500). By including this study in her article Kilbourne is providing evidence and supporting her claim that women are living in a constant state of
In the article “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt,” by Jean Killbourne, she discusses the culture of male superiority over females. With the rise of feminism and exposure to media being at an all-time high, the two topics seem to be overlapping more and more. Daily, society is flooded with sexist, violent, and inappropriate ads and messages that usually degrade women and praise men. This is an issue which only recently gained traction while the “feminist” movement increased in popularity. Women are wrongly objectified for the sake of tradition and a male-driven agenda. This thought has been held on for far too long.
Kilbourne includes various advertisements where the woman is the victim and target. The advertisements and media depicted women being overly sexualized, they promoted or glorified date rape, sex is the most important aspect of a relationship, fetishizes various products, and made men believe these were the correct ways to view or treat women. The audience these advertisements are appealing to are men because media depicts women as always being the victims. Men are lead to believe that they should buy certain products as portrayed in media or advertisements because they will get the attention from the ladies. “The violence, the abuse, is partly the chilling but logical result of the objectification” (Kilbourne 498). When women are so used to seeing themselves as objectified they soon start to believe it. Women become more vulnerable because it shows men that anything is possible with just a spritz of perfume or a certain brand of an alcoholic drink. Industries do not think twice before making an advertisement because they are not the victims. Violence is the main problem that arises due to advertisements. “Women are always available as the targets of aggression and violence, women are inferior to men and thus deserve to be dominated, and women exist to fulfill the needs of men” (Kilbourne 509). As long as industries make money, nothing is off limits to put on advertisements even if it is making someone a victim. No remorse of any sort is shown because as long as money is present nothing else matters to the
Thus, we can assume that the audience itself, the members who believe in the content of ads and its sincerity, as well as, people who agree with the portrait of the women that is being created are the only prisoners in this particular situation. “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Plato 868). On the other hand, according to the Jean Kilbourne, author of “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt” what is not mention to the public is the fact, that many women from the very young age during the process of finding out the truth and being blinded by the “light” are fighting with depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders and sexual harassment. “I contend that all girls growing up in this culture are sexually abused – abused by the pornographic images of female sexuality that surround them from birth, abused by all the violence against woman and girls, and abused by the constant harassment and threat of violence” (Kilbourne
She claims that it is “in our Sunday news. With our morning coffee…the endless commercials and advertisements we believe we pay no attention to” (149) By referring to background examples of the media’s omnipresent influence, she allows the reader to understand how easy it is for many women to get lost in the world of images. In addition, she notes that as a feminist professor of gender studies even she is not immune from the negative impacts of media culture. She organizes her argument in what seems to be almost a list; one by one, she gives her readers a multitude of examples detailing the many ways women and girls are being bombarded with various stimuli influencing ways they should act, dress, and
According to Jeanne Kilbourne essay, Kilbourne talks about women being abused by men in visual advertisements and the consequences of those representations. I for one, argue with Kilbourne that women are being too exposed and hurt when they are in advertisements. So using Kilbourne 's analytical perspective and my own perspective we can give our insights on why we feel women are being treated badly and unequally from men with the following pictures. From the past till today women in advertisement pictures have been mostly victimized by men, and Kilbourne and I feel this sort of action needs to come to an end.
Kilbourne, Jean. “‘Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt’: Advertising and Violence.” From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader. 2nd ed. Eds. Stuart Green and April Lidinsky. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2012. 459-480. Print.
The documentary Killing Us Softly 4 discusses and examines the role of women in advertisements and the effects of the ads throughout history. The film begins by inspecting a variety of old ads. The speaker, Jean Kilbourne, then discusses and dissects each ad describing the messages of the advertisements and the subliminal meanings they evoke. The commercials from the past and now differ in some respects but they still suggest the same messages. These messages include but are not limited to the following: women are sexual objects, physical appearance is everything, and women are naturally inferior then men. Kilbourne discusses that because individuals are surrounded by media and advertisements everywhere they go, that these messages become real attitudes and mindsets in men and women. Women believe they must achieve a level of beauty similar to models they see in magazines and television commercials. On the other hand, men expect real women to have the same characteristics and look as beautiful as the women pictured in ads. However, even though women may diet and exercise, the reality...
Frye opens the essay with a statement how women’s anger is not well received by this society. Men view women’s anger as worthless and ignorable because they cannot control their anger as they view them simply because she was upset, hysterical or crazy. Men tend to control their anger by through violence, or downgrading by informing her how he cannot handle her anger. Male had not understood the fact that anger is normal reaction for the irritability, disorderly and frustrations caused by other person from the person to able go forth to their desired goal. For example, you are looking forward to go a concert but the storm hit, thus making the concert to cancel which it ends of disappointment but not anger since you cannot control the weather.
In a brilliant update of the Killing Us Softly series, Jean Kilbourne explains the dangers of advertisements and how they objectify women. Advertisements intelligently portray women in a sexual and distorted way in order to attract the consumers’ attention. Media sets a standard on how young women view themselves and puts them at risk for developing an eating disorder. Kilbourne’s research has led her to educate those who have fallen victim to achieving the “ideal beauty” that has evolved in today’s society.
Jean Kilbourne’s “Two Way a Woman Can Get Hurt: Advertising and Violence” is a section of a book titled: “Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising” that was originally published in 1999. It is about the images of women that advertisements illustrate. The central claim or thesis of the document is that: “advertising helps to create a climate in which certain attitudes and values flourish and it plays a role in shaping people’s ideas” (paraphrase). The author wants people by all genders and young children to acknowledge a right attitude towards what is shown in the advertisements so that the standards of behavior will not be influenced. As a result, it enables the negative contribution from the advertisements to be limited or eliminated.
To sum up, it is often said that advertising is shaping women gender identity, and some have been argued that the statement is true, because of the higher amount of sexual references of women that advertisement show and the damages that occur on women’s personality and the public negative opinions of those women. As well, the negative effects that those kinds of advertisements cause to young generations and make them feel like they should simulate such things and are proud of what they are doing because famous actors are posting their pictures that way. Others deem this case as a personal freedom and absolutely unrelated to shaping women gender identity. On the contrast, they believe that, those sorts of advertisements are seriously teaching women how to stay healthy and be attractive, so they might have self-satisfaction after all.
Side-by-side are two advertisements, each showing a picture of a car and two family members. The ads demonstrate the amount of power allotted to women in the times they were made. The differences in these ads far outweigh the similarities. The ad from a 1954 Good Housekeeping shows a woman being reprimanded by her husband for wrecking their car. The otherfrom a 2003 Redbookshows a wife and mother holding her daughter with one hand and an umbrella with the other. One woman is ignorant, irresponsible, incapable, and not in control; the other is competent, responsible, and in control. The evolution of advertising reflects the changes that have taken place in the way American society views women. The ads use body image, body language, and text to encapsulate the stereotypical women of each era; in the 50's, women needed to be controlled, but now women can be in control.
The Tiger Beer advertisement shown in the appendix is a clear example of the objectification of women in advertising. The Tiger Beer advert was made to appeal to men from the age of 20 to 60. The advert seeks to get a cheap laugh from the target audience with the image of the woman in a sexual pose and the picture of the beer. The ad promotes the idea that beer is the most desirable thing in the ‘Far East’ and that beer is much more important than women. It also openly laughs at the South East Asian sex trade by putting a prostitute in the middle of the ad. The ad also implies that women in the ‘Far East’ are only good for sex (dressing in revealing, sexual clothes designed to make the woman in the ad seem more desirable).
In “Killing Us Softly” , a documentary based on the lectures of Jean Kilbourne, advertisers are discussed as “America’s real pornographers” as they constantly use images that sexualize women to sell things. This constant use of sexualization can be harmful to a woman's self esteem and in turn creates a desire to always want to be someone else. The constant sexualization is also, to a point, comical, which creates a space for culture jammers to manipulate images, attack, and make fun of it. An example of this would be the Guerrilla Girls, they employed the use of culture jamming to create conversation in the constant sexualization of women in the art world and media. A bold poster they put up stated that “less than 5% of artists in the modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”, this has un-arguably become one of their most famous pieces and goes along with attempting to subvert views that the media presents.
With so much exposure to this type of media, it is easy to become desensitised to it. With America becoming numb to the violence in these advertising tactics, domestic violence is an increasing problem as brutality against women has become trivialized. Jean Kilbourne 's “‘Two Ways a Woman can get Hurt”: Advertising and Violence’ argues that violence in advertising profoundly affects people in a skewed physiological manner, leading to violence against women. Kilbourne insists that “...violent images contributes to the state of terror...” felt by women who feel victimized by men who “...objectify and are disconnected...” from the women they mistreat (431). She furthers her argument by dictating that “....turning a human being into…an object, is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person” (431). So much of the media that America consumes is centered on dehumanizing women into an object of male enjoyment. It is difficult to have empathy toward a material object. Because of this objectification, men feel less guilty when enacting brutality upon women. Violence becomes downplayed because it is seen everywhere - in advertising and media - and this has contributed significantly to the cases of domestic violence in America. America has become numb to violence against women in advertising, leading to an alarming increasing domestic violence in this