Advertising and the Body

For this assignment, you are asked to watch the video Killing Us Softly 4 by Jean Kilbourne. After viewing the video, look through recent popular magazines, hardcopies or on the Internet, and see if you can find advertisements that objectify women in order to sell a product. Or watch some TV commercials or browse the Internet or YouTube for some current ads. You can look for beer commercials; commercials for food, chocolate; detergents or any house cleaning products. Study these images in the context you have chosen, then write a short paper (about 2-3pages) about how advertising objectifies women in order to sell products, and how this objectification creates ìthe sexualization of culture.î

This assignment asks you to go one step further, by examining the influence of advertising on you personally and your self-worth, but also how you believe advertising affects other women and  men. Include your ad with your essay. You are required to use assigned course readings (linked articles) to support your argument.

Throughout your written analysis, be sure to make clear and specific reference to the images you selected, the approximate timeframe in which they appeared / broadcasted, and please submit these images (or links to them) with your paper. You can refer to 1 or all 5 questions listed above, or others found in the online Study Guide, and/or you can add other questions to answer to, as long as you use your feminist understanding to reflect on your ad.

reference:

1.Jhally, S. (2008). Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse. Retrieved from www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/

2. Gill, R. (2009).  Beyond the ësexualization of cultureí thesis: an intersectional analysis of ësixpacks,í ëmidriffs,í and ëhot lesbiansí in advertising. Sexualities, 12(2): 137-160. 

3. Kilbourne, J. (2010). Killing Us Softly 4. Cambridge: Cambridge Documentaries. 

lecture materials aboutìthe sexualization of culture.î

Introduction:

In the second lesson, we examined some of the stereotypical representations of women in popular culture from the 1950s to 1980s. In this lesson, we consider how advertising continues to exert a tremendous influence on the lifestyle choices we make, as it plays on our most basic unconscious instincts. Yet more importantly, advertising continues to stratify the Western world in two: those who have the (financial) power to buy the advertised products; and those who do not have it, and are (financially) disempowered. This classist divide, which equates desire with power, becomes even further accentuated on a global level, especially when Western products (along with their advertisements) are imported in non-Western countries. Behind products and advertisements, there are ideologies and cultural beliefs that are being sold, beliefs that speak about certain societal norms of who is deemed ìdesirableî, ìattractiveî or ìworth itî of being successful, happy, forever young, beautiful etc. In this lesson, we will see what kind of culture advertising creates, and what meanings do they construct in the images represented? Let us turn now to the influence of advertising

The Influence of Advertising

Undoubtedly the influence of mass media on our lives is profound. Of all types of media, advertising has perhaps the most powerful effect, pervading almost every aspect of daily life.  The world of advertising is in a constant process of becoming; it is a fluid process that has drastically changed since it has been first used in 1704 (ìAd Age,î 1999). From ads in newspapers, to ads on billboards, at bus stops, or in the buses, to ads in the university halls or in the washrooms, to ads on Facebook, or any site you browse on the Internet, to Netflix, or other apps you might use, advertising has become an intrinsic part of our lives. Even though some of us may still feel that we can rationally and consciously resist and engage critically all ads on a regular basis, advertising still has the potential to exert a significant influence on our thoughts, attitudes, perceptions and actions, mostly at an unconscious level. This is one of the main arguments made by the well-known feminist critique, Jean Kilbourne (2012), in her new book Canít Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. There she writes: ìFar from being a passive mirror of society, advertising is an effective and pervasive medium of influence and persuasion, and its influence is cumulative, often subtle, and primarily unconsciousî (p. 67). Equally pervasive and invasive is the role that advertising plays in the construction of both Western and non-Western collectivities, communities or national imaginaries. In all instances, – at an individual, local and global level ñ advertising has the potential to influence or destroy various aspects of human life and its capacity to interact meaningfully with each other. As Sut Jhally (2008), another well-known advertising critic notes, in a somewhat apocalyptic tone, ì20th century is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-western peoples and will prevent peoples of the world from achieving true happiness. Simply stated, our survival as a species is dependent upon minimizing the threat from advertising and the commercial culture that has spawned itî (para. 1).

Some Strategies Used in Advertising

One strategy used in advertising is to manufacture unhappy consumers. In the documentary entitled ìThe Ad and the Egoî (1997) (whose full transcript you can find online at this address: www.webpages.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/Media%20Readings/Ad%20and%20Ego.htm) Bernard McGrane argues there that one of the main functions of advertising has become ìthe production of discontent in human beings.î He notes, ìOne of the sub-texts in all advertising is you are not OK; you are not OK the way you are; things are bad; you need help; you need salvation, and in that sense advertising is designated to generate endless self-criticism, to generate all sorts of anxieties, all sorts of doubts, and then to offer the entire world of consumer goods as salvation. Thatís where salvation rests, anything and everything that you can buyî (retrieved from the section ìManufacturing Consumersî (00:09:14) Punctuation was slightly modified to better fit the written context). Advertising thus does not create happy consumers, but rather unhappy ones, and its function is not a therapeutic one, as McGrane notes. Rather, advertising is intended to ìgenerate an inner sense of conflict with ourselvesî (McGrane, 1997). So making people feel the constant stress and anxiety of not being ìattractiveî, ìdesirableî or ìfashionableî enough is what convinces people, in general, to buy things they otherwise wouldnít.

This ìproduction of discontentî inadvertently helps in creating another effective advertising strategy: that is, the sexualization of products. To alleviate our feelings of ìdiscontentî or ìinner conflicts,î advertising proposes the therapy and pleasure of sexual fantasies. We are all familiar with products advertised in very explicit sexual terms. We only need to take a quick look at a few of them. Consider this ad for Converse, showing a young woman, infantilized and strapped into a Converse shoe, sucking seductively on a lollipop. To see the ad, click here: 

www.adrants.com/images/converse_pink_lollipop.jpg

All these scenes are unfortunately everywhere in popular culture, to one degree or another, and it has become common knowledge that advertising uses sex to sell products. For many feminist critics, as Rosalind Gill (2009) argues, this strategy in advertising is ìcause for alarm,î and a signal of the ìdegradation and profanity of popular culture,î which requires ìurgent feminist concernî (p. 138). Gill takes this need for urgent feminist intervention in the ways in which popular culture portrays women a step further, in her attempt to examine the tenets of the ìsexualization of cultureî and to propose alternative ways of addressing and responding to advertising. Her article ìBeyond the ìSexualization of Cultureî Thesis: An Intersectional Analysis of ëSixpacks,í ëMidriffs,í and ëHot Lesbiansí in Advertising,î is listed for todayís readings. As you begin reading it, try to think of how you can respond to the following questions that we will take up in detail on the discussion board:

In the Study Guide to Killing Us Softly 4, there are some helpful questions that might assist you with this assignment. I selected a few below, and modified some to pertain specifically to our lesson. Others can be found at the following online address: www.mediaed.org/assets/products/241/studyguide_241.pdf

1 What effect(s), if any, do you think the objectification of womenís bodies has on the Western culture? Do you think the effects are different in the Canadian multicultural context? Explain.

2 Jean Kilbourne states ìturning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person.î What do you think she means by this? Do you agree with her reasoning? Why or why not? How does the ad you have chosen relate to Kilbourneís reasoning? Explain.

3 Why do you think that women are objectified more often than men are? Kilbourne explains that the consequences of being objectified are different ñ and more serious ñ for women than for men. Do you agree? How is the world different for women than it is for men? How do objectified images of women interact with those in our culture differently from the way images of men do? Why is it important to look at images in the context of the culture?

4 How is sexuality depicted in relation to race, class, age, ableness? Who is made to feel more desirable, powerful and superior? How are other races depicted?

5 What language does usually accompany the ad? What stories does the ad tell about women and their current role in society?

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