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 myself shaking my head in disagreement during her lecture; her viewpoint is a very specific one, and I think there’s another way to look at the issue. So, 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: Kilbourne says this sarcastically: what she’s really doing here is objecting to the use of ‘ideal female beauty’ and that it is not as important for a woman to be beautiful as advertisers suggest. But how does Kilbourne know these are ‘ideal’ women? Doesn’t she believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Or, as I suspect, does she know that the beauty of the women used by advertisers 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 question of which came first, the ‘ideal female beauty’ in our minds (including Kilbourne’s) or the advertising depicting it, is fairly easy to answer. We all have an innate idea of what attracts us to females in the first place, and advertisers merely exploit it. (I say ‘all’ rather than ‘men’ because our idea of female beauty is rather objective as discerned by science, and advertisers are appealing to women using women, as well as appealing to men using women, for this reason.) Researchers know precisely what this ‘ideal woman’ consists of in terms of her hip-to-waist ratio, symmetry, skin complexion, gait, 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 is not, therefore, the fault of advertisers that we have this idea, and I find it difficult to criticize them for making use of it. (If your hard-earned money were at risk promoting a product the sales of which you hope will make you a living, would you be happy with an agency depicting unattractive people in your ad? If not, then the next pertinent question is this: Which models will appeal to the widest audience? Claudia Schiffer may not be far down the list. I do, however, accept that they don’t need to be perfect: it seems to me that advertisers would benefit from using more ‘real’ women – rather than Barbie dolls – commercially. Things are beginning to get more diverse as media becomes more ‘narrow-band’ and niche-driven.)

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. A product shaped like a female torso is nothing more or less than a depiction of something beautiful, in the way other ads may use beautiful landscapes and others beautiful homes and others all three beautiful things together in a beautiful, appealing pile of beautiful. In the case of the perfume bottle, it’s obviously aimed at women (it’s perfume) rather than men, and hopes to appeal to a woman’s sense of her own beauty. (‘By wearing this perfume’, they hope she’ll think, ‘I may give off this exquisitely beautiful vibe.’)

KILBOURNE: “Turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence towards that person.”

RESPONSE: Although this may seem like nonsense, what Kilbourne is saying here 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 – not even slightly – nor any of the other products or art pieces which celebrate or depict the female form.

KILBOURNE: “Most often the focus is on breasts….”

RESPONSE: …because men find breasts attractive, and many (most?) 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: This got quite a giggle from the audience. But there are 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 perfectly free to ignore. Second: men are, in fact, the target of precisely the 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 not a minor one. The point 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 exactly 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 ‘we all’ made the very grave mistake of assuming that advertising was trying to teach us! Advertising is merely a proposal competing for attention, an argument: ‘You lack this; we can provide it.’ A rational individual is free to ignore it completely, consider its premise and reject it, or consider its premise and accept it as something which could benefit them (which is often the result, or else advertisers would not be in business). Fundamentally, advertising exists to sell products and services, and what ‘we all’ need to do is to understand its role rather than imagine that everything it says is automatically true just because it’s on the air or in print. Frankly, if a woman thinks a suggestion that her breasts are not perfect the way they are is true just because a company wrote it in a print ad aimed at selling her something, 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: Well I’m glad she admits it. But then she goes on to imply that, because they’re less ‘intimate, less related to the body’, they’re less harmful. Why is a stereotype which relates to the body worse than any other stereotype? A common stereotype of men is that they should be successful and wealthy to be considered attractive. That strikes me as a potentially hugely harmful stereotype. Why is a stereotype of what an attractive woman looks like any worse than that? Or any better? Kilbourne doesn’t address this basic question, and – again – I’m afraid this annihilates her premise.

KILBOURNE: “This is a body type that basically doesn’t exist, and yet it’s the only one we ever see.”

REPSONSE: A good 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 little 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 should not be the basis for exacting 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: This one had me almost fall off my chair. Here, Kilbourne admits she knows fully what the ad is saying about simplicity in fashion, yet still chooses to mischaracterize it as a ‘horrible message’ about the weight of the model in an unlikely connection that she’s imposed on the ad. 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: Finally an interesting observation, which speaks as much to the traditional roles of man as the strong protector and woman as the vulnerable and protected as it does degrading of women. But she’s right: contemporary sexism takes the form of expecting women to be passive and expecting men to be active, women to be submissive and men to be dominant.

Kilbourne 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 to the desired conclusion; in the manner of advertisers, in fact, 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: Sorry to nitpick, but there is no ultimate message, because there is no ultimate authority on this. 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.

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, rather than people’s view of sex being shaped most 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 hundred 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 does one 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 a positive correlation between advertising of this nature in places with high rates of teen pregnancies compared with places with lower rates. She can’t, because there is no such correlation.

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 in principle? (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 Kilbourne’s 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 often 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.