Class Notes

11.15.02

By: Maddy Wiseman

Killing us Softely 3--Kilbourne

Americans watch 3,000 ads every day. They will spend 3 years of their life watching commercials. Advertising's foundation on mass media is to sell products.

They tell us who we are and who we should be. Specifically, how women should look.

Advertising, however, portrays certain aspects of bodies.

Computer inhancment is used to create women that don't exsist. Further it perpetutates the idea that anyone can obtain this look, if they try hard enough.

Women's bodies are shown as objects and things. This method of production shows persons as less than human and thoughout history, when this is done, violence is the next step.

Women of color oare erotized as animals and not fully human.

Often one part of the body is focused on. Specificaally that of breasts, breast size, and plastic surgery. This sends out the message that breast can never be okay.

Studies have shown that girls' self-esteem drops in adolesence.

Women and men are in different worlds and governed by different stereotypes as shown in advertising. Ads focus on looks, specificaly the look and bodies of 5% of actual women. Women are acceptible as long as they are young and white. Women take up less space and have less power. 1 in 5 women develop an eating dissorde such as anorexia or bulimia. But if we classify any obsessive eating behavior as a dissorder, 4 out 5 women have one. Do ads cut women down to size? Women silenced in ads.

What body language do women's bodies show in ads?--passive, vuneralbe; active boys and passive girls in parents magazines, unless race is added into the picture; women can have power if it is masculine; but women's power is trivialized; infantilizes women as it sexualizes them.

Sex is used to sell everything. Ads are heterosexist. It also shows bondages and pornographic sex as normalized. Specifically that of violence against women which is erotized.

...then we left class.