The movie “Killing Us Softly 4” shows the various ways of scrutinizing a woman’s body, and how the women are ridiculously represented in the advertisement industry. Jean Kilbourne the speaker in the movie has collected a lot of evidence on how a woman is portrayed in ads since 1960’s. Advertisers always target to persuade the customers to buy products, and Kilbourne displays the manner in which the companies create ads for various products and trade morals and ethics, way of life, and measurable things, and the most common perception displayed in the advertisement portrays the female gender as a quiet, delicate, and sexually available. A woman is shown on the product to make it look good, and reveal sexuality to boost the customers to buy the product without giving importance to her value and self-esteem.
A few facts in the advertisement industry that surprised me were that the advertisers create ads based on sex and gender. If an advertisement contained a woman then her body was given more prominence and she delivered all emotions like passion, innocence, aggression, and temptation at the same time; however if the advertisement contained a man then the woman was shown as helpless, dependent, an unwanted piece of art, and not so powerful. Not only do a majority of advertisements objectify a specific body part belonging to a woman, but some also portray women as being the tolerant victims of male violence (Kilbourne video).
Multimedia also plays a major role in portraying the images of women in advertisements. It is a harsh truth to know that most images are edited in Photoshop or an image editing application to give respect to the clothes designed by the fashion designers rather than the women wearing them. Some examples in which the celebrities showed discomfort in the edited images were, Cindy Crawford who stated “I wish like I looked like Cindy Crawford” (Kilbourne video), and Kate Winslet who stated on the GQ magazine that released her edited image, “I don’t look like that, and I don’t desire to look like that, I can tell you that they’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third” (Kilbourne video).
The images and the messages captured in the “Killing Us Softly 4” documentary movie instill a sense of the tricks played by media in ads that are thought provoking. It would be appreciated if the advertisers replace the thin, sexy models with real life women, and not consider women as sex objects to sell a product. A logical advertisement pulls more customers than an enticing advertisement.
Works Cited
Kilbourne, Jean, Ed.D. “Killing Us Softly 4; Advertising Images of Women.” Media Education
Foundation Production. 2010. DVD-ROM. 20 May. 2013
