This is my response to a lecture by Jean Kilbourne, made into a video documentary called ‘Killing Us Softly 3′ on the subject of women in advertising. She’s since produced another called ‘Generation M: Misogyny in Media and Culture’ and is a regular speaker at universities on these issues.
The lecture she gave focuses on advertising and the role of women. Everything she says is delivered warmly and with wit, and she generally comes across as very likable. However I found her message objectionable on many levels. Here are some of the main quotes from the lecture and my responses.
KILBOURNE: “The first thing the advertisers do is surround us with the image of ideal female beauty, so we all learn how important it is for a woman to be beautiful, and exactly what it takes.”
RESPONSE: How does Kilbourne know these are ideal women? Doesn’t she think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Or, as I suspect, does she know that the beauty of these women is in the eyes of a vast majority of beholders, and used by advertisers for that reason? After all, she describes them as possessing “ideal female beauty”. What advertisers are doing, of course, is using models they feel will be attractive to most viewers; that’s all.
In other words, the answer of which came first, the “ideal female beauty” in our minds or the advertising depicting it, is of course that we all have an innate idea of what attracts us to females in the first place, and advertisers merely exploit it. Researchers know precisely what this idea consists of in terms of hip to waist ratio, symmetry, skin complexion, walk, etc.. It turns out that these things are mostly objective rather than subjective standards of beauty, according to research, and the closer one’s partner approaches perfection, the more attractive we will usually find them.
It therefore is not the fault of advertisers that we have this idea, and I find it difficult to fault them for making use of it. (If my money were at risk promoting a product the sales of which I hope will make me a living, I wouldn’t want them using models depicting unattractive people, and I don’t think you would either. I however do accept that they don’t need to be perfect: it seems to me that advertisers would benefit from using more real women commercially.)
KILBOURNE: “Women’s bodies are still turned into objects, into things… [images show a perfume bottle shaped like a female torso].”
RESPONSE: Because we have this innate idea of what is beautiful about women, we create things which celebrate it. They are nothing more than a depiction of something beautiful, in the way other ads will use beautiful landscapes and others beautiful homes.
KILBOURNE: “Turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence towards that person.”
RESPONSE: What she’s saying is that women being objectified in general can lead to violence toward them. I’m sure that’s true. But that doesn’t make a torso-shaped perfume bottle wrong, even slightly, nor any of the other products or art pieces which celebrate the female form.
KILBOURNE: “Most often the focus is on breasts….”
RESPONSE: Because men find breasts attractive, and many men find a fuller bust attractive. If this were not the case, advertising would not have an interest in portraying it. That is why, before advertising ever began to feature the bust, art did the same thing.
KILBOURNE: “Then we’re told to wear uplifting bras … imagine if men were supposed to play this game … Wonder Jock, the strap for the bulge you’ve always wanted!”
RESPONSE: Two things to say here. First, “supposed” is the wrong word; women who wear uplifting bras want to be attractive by possessing what is widely considered beautiful (such as a fuller bust). Nobody is “supposed” to do anything; advertising exists to sell products which women are free to ignore. Second, men are, in fact, the target of the exact kinds of ads she implies they’re not! ‘Male enhancement’ pills claim to create the “bulge you’ve always wanted”. Deodorants, cologne, cars, watches and other status symbols are marketed to men for the improvement of their general attractiveness to partners. How is Kilbourne missing this crucial point? And it’s a point that extends to the rest of what she’s saying. Her paranoia about advertising to females is grossly ignorant of the myriad advertising which draws upon precisely the same opposite points to males, a fact which destroys her basic premise.
KILBOURNE: “We all learn very early on that our breasts are never okay the way they are.”
RESPONSE: Well then you all made the very grave mistake of assuming that advertising was trying to teach you. Advertising is a proposal, an argument: ‘You lack this; we can provide it.’ A sensible person will either ignore the proposal completely or consider it, reject its premise, accept its premise but not its conclusion, or find the product it’s selling and consider whether it would fulfill a need. Fundamentally, advertising exists to sell products and services, and what “we all” need to “learn” is to understand its role rather than imagine that everything it says is true. Frankly, if a woman thinks a suggestion that her breasts are not perfect the way they are is true because a company wrote it in a print ad, she has bigger problems with learning than with advertising.
KILBOURNE: “That’s not to say there aren’t stereotypes that harm men, there are plenty of stereotypes that harm men, but they tend to be less intimate, less related to the body.”
RESPONSE: Why is a stereotype which relates to the body worse than any other stereotype?
KILBOURNE: “This is a body type that basically doesn’t exist, and yet it’s the only one we ever see.”
REPSONSE: That’s a decent point. Again, it happens for the reasons I cited above – we enjoy looking at the ideal female form in the way we enjoy watching ideal lives on television and reading about fantasy worlds in novels. There’s nothing wrong with that, and no man I know expects women to look like the women they see on ads. If anything, most men I know are extremely forgiving; it’s the women who are dissatisfied with their bodies. The message for women, then, is that the female forms celebrated in art and used in advertising are not to be used to exact criticisms upon themselves.
KILBOURNE: “In this ad, at the top it says, ‘The more you subtract, the more you add.’ What a horrible message. Now this is a fashion ad, they’re talking about simplicity in fashion, but she’s also very thin….”
RESPONSE: Are you kidding me?! So Kilbourne knows full well what the ad is saying about simplicity in fashion and still mischaracterizes it as a “horrible message” because of the unlikely connection she’s imposed on the ad with the weight of the model? I’ve noticed this continual reaching all throughout her lecture.
KILBOURNE: “The obsession with thinness is really, I think, about cutting girls down to size, silencing them…”
RESPONSE: Really? And I suppose the obsession with breasts is about having a rounded personality and the obsession with legs about having a two-pronged approach to life? This is just utter rubbish, and as she begins to read carefully-selected ad copy after carefully-selected ad copy, her seminar begins to sound more and more like that of a raving conspiracy theorist, the kind who imagines all sorts of messages coming from a Borg-like collective.
KILBOURNE: “The image of girls and women is usually passive, vulnerable, and very different from the body language of boys and men. Women typically pose like this, and men like this…”
RESPONSE: Interesting observation, which speaks more to the traditional roles of man as the strong protector and woman as the vulnerable and protected than it does any degrading of women. She goes on to read her version of things into the body language of the models in several other ads, every time interpreting for the audience as she went lest they ‘miss it’ (in the manner of a psychic or medium who must keep talking to guide the minds of their audience; in the manner of advertisers who must sell their product to a gullible pack). For every one of her examples I could find another which refutes her damning commentary, but Kilbourne is in charge of the projector.
KILBOURNE: “The ultimate message that women and girls get…”
RESPONSE: There is no ultimate message, because there is no ultimate authority. The message depends on who you pay attention to. Pay attention to an ad, you get one message. Pay attention to Kilbourne, you get the message she’s selling: the idea that women are too stupid to differentiate between advertising and reality. Give them some credit!
KILBOURNE: “Sex is both more important and less important than our culture makes it out to be.”
RESPONSE: What she really means by “our culture” is ‘advertising’. And I agree. Sex is both more important and less important than its portrayal in advertising. But advertising is less important than Kilbourne thinks it is, and it certainly isn’t the sum total of “our culture” as her choice of words implies. In reality, people’s view of sex is not shaped significantly by advertising; on the contrary, advertising is shaped by our views of sex.
KILBOURNE: “Advertising always implies that women need men in order to be happy…”
RESPONSE: …and that men need women (Calvin Klein, Axe, and a thousand others). So what?
KILBOURNE: “And in all this …. there’s no emphasis on relationships or on intimacy…”
RESPONSE: What is she missing about the ad she just played showing a man and a woman rolling around on a bed? What could be more intimate? And how else do you portray a relationship in 30 seconds? Is she really claiming not to have seen attempts to portray relationships in advertising?
KILBOURNE: “No wonder we have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world.”
RESPONSE: I hope she isn’t trying to claim that the high rate of teen pregnancy in America is due to the influence of advertising. She would need to show that the countries in the developed world with lower rates of teen pregnancy had less advertising, or less advertising of this nature. They don’t.
KILBOURNE: “When bondage is used to sell [various products], we can say that pornography has become mainstream.”
RESPONSE: Let’s suppose that’s true. Is it so obvious that we must instantly agree with her implication that pornography becoming mainstream is to be lamented? Is she going to give us some moral arguments against pornography? Or some arguments about promiscuity? I suppose this is an area which unites feminists like Kilbourne and her traditional foes in conservative circles.
KILBOURNE: “[We need a society] that sees itself primarily as citizens rather than as consumers. … What’s at stake for all of us … is our ability to have authentic and freely-chosen lives, nothing less.”
RESPONSE: Who could agree more with that last statement than I, a spirited libertarian, to whom freedom is the defining value? And yet I couldn’t agree less with the thrust of her message here, which sometimes seems more degrading to women than many of the ads she criticizes. If women are free, as she suggests, then they are free to reject the proposals of advertisements and think for themselves. And I believe that’s exactly what they’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with portraying an ideal; it’s believing that anything less is unacceptable that is so damaging. The lesson is for the audience, therefore, rather than for the advertisers.
Jean Kilbourne’s official website can be found here.
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