Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women
Released in 1999 by Media Educational Foundation, this is a film of a presentation by Jean Kilbourne about how media advertising has portrayed women in sexualized, objectified, submissive and negative ways. This is not a knee jerk reactionary feminist esoteric reading of print and television ads, but a prima facie matter of simple deconstruction. Her readings are straight forward, and she supports these readings with a recognition of the purpose of advertising as well as some quotes from the inside from professional marketers and trade publications.
She utilizes several different domains of advertising for her discussion. She also presents how the depiction of the female has changed in advertising since the late 1960s until now. Of particular note is how she approached female sexuality through the form of various food and “homemaking” ads. She also approaches the topic of women in alcohol ads with a scathing sarcasm that underpins the futile oxymoron of using sex to sell alcohol, a substance which increased usage of decreases your ability to perform the other.
Kilbourne approaches the topics with occasional humor, and though her jokes are occasionally the groan worthy the practiced quips of a college professor’s stale lecture. Not all of the jokes are that way, some of them are genuinely funny…just not all of them. It is a good presentation and should be eye opening to people who have not been exposed to such criticism of the marketing machine. There is the unfortunate truth that this video was produced in the late 1990s, and as sophisticated as marketing was then we have the added dimension of the internet, social media and the increasingly difficult to read method of using ironic posture and self-depreciating truths to develop a virtual authenticity that can sometimes be more powerful than a direct sell of a products attributes (such as the turn that smoking advertisements took in the late 1990s).
You can watch the whole thing on Google video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1993368502337678412
