Killing us softly 3 full video

Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women Dir. Sut Jhally. Perf. Jean Kilbourne, David

Rabinovitz. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2010. Film

FULL TRANSCRIPT

I started collecting ads in the late 1960s. Many aspects of my life led to this: my

involvement with the Women’s Movement, which was just taking off then, my interest in media,

some experiences I had as a model. I didn’t intend to create a career, let alone launch a field of

study, but that is what happened. I was just paying attention to ads; ads like these:

“Feminine odor is everyone’s problem.”

“Made for a woman’s extra feelings,” which presumably are located in her armpits.

“It sure is a load of Roy, since I lost 59 pounds.” Or this version: “I’d probably never be

married now if I hadn’t lost 49 pounds,” which one woman said to me was the best

advertisement for fat she’d ever seen.

“If your hair isn’t beautiful, the rest hardly matters.”

“Honey, your anti-perspirant spray just doesn’t do it.”

“Your guy: another reason for Midol.”

“My boyfriend said he loved me for my mind. I was never so insulted in my life.”

“She’s built like all our products…heavy where she has to take the strain.” This was an

ad for construction material.

And “Keep her where she belongs.”

So these were just some of the ads that I noticed and saw out there, and I cut them out

and put them on my refrigerator, and eventually I had a kind of collage of ads. And I started to

see a pattern, a kind of statement about what it meant to be a woman in the culture. And

eventually I bought a camera and a copy-stand, and I started to make slides of these ads to give a

presentation about it.

In 1979, I made my first film Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. In 1987, I

remade it as Still Killing Us Softly, and then again in 2000 as Killing Us Softly 3. And now, here

we are a decade or so into the new millennium.

(2:30)

Sometimes people say to me, “You’ve been talking about this for 40 years. Have things

gotten any better?” And actually I have to say, really, they’ve gotten worse. The biggest change

is that I’m no longer alone, that there are now countless books and organizations, websites, films,

other people who are working on these issues.

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Now I focus on advertising because I’ve always considered it to be a very powerful

educational force. It’s an over 250 billion-dollar-a year-industry, just in the United States. The

average American is exposed to over 3,000 ads every single day and will spend two years of his

or her life watching television commercials—just the commercials. The ads as you know are

everywhere; our schools, the sides of buildings, sports stadiums, build boards, bus stops, buses

themselves, cars, elevators, doctor’s offices, airplanes, even on food items like eggs. Almost

every aspect of popular culture is really all about marketing.

[Clip from Transformers, 2007] “Hey! Who drove the freakin’ yellow Camaro, huh!?

There’s a car on the lawn!”

Advertising is more sophisticated and more influential than ever before, but still, just

about everyone feels personally exempt from the influence of advertising. So wherever I go,

what I hear more than anything else is, “Oh, I don’t pay attention to ads; I just tune them out.

They have no effect on me.” Now I hear this most often from people wearing Budweiser caps,

but that’s another story.

Another reason we believe we’re not influenced is that advertising’s influence is quick, is

cumulative, and for the most part, it’s sub-conscious. As the editor-in-chief of Advertising Age,

again the major publication of the advertising industry, once said, “Only 8% of an ad’s message

is received by the conscious mind. The rest is worked and reworked deep within the recesses of

the brain.” So it’s not just that we see these images once, or twice, or even a hundred times. They

stay with us, and we process them, mostly, subconsciously. They create an environment, an

environment that we all swim in, as fish swim in water.

And just as it’s difficult to be healthy in a toxic physical environment, if we’re breathing

poisoned air for example or drinking polluted water, so it’s difficult to be healthy in what I call a

toxic cultural environment—an environment that surrounds us with unhealthy images and that

constantly sacrifices our health and our sense of wellbeing for the sake of profit. Ads sell more

than products; they sell values, they sell images, they sell concepts of love and sexuality, of

success, and perhaps most important or normalcy. To a great extent, they tell us who we are, and

who we should be.

(5:00)

But what does advertising tell us about women? It tells us, as it always has, that what’s

most important is how we look. So the first thing the advertisers do is surround us with the image

of ideal female beauty.

Women learn from a very early age that we must spend enormous amounts of time,

energy, and above all, money, striving to achieve this look, and feeling ashamed and guilty when

we fail. And failure is inevitable, because the ideal is based on absolute flawlessness. She never

has any lines or wrinkles; she certainly has no scars or blemishes; indeed, she has no pores.

And the most important aspect of this flawlessness is that it cannot be achieved; no one

looks like this, including her. And this is the truth: no one looks like this. The supermodel Cindy

Crawford once said, "I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford." She doesn’t; she couldn’t because

this is a look that’s been created for years through airbrushing and cosmetics, but these days it’s

done through the magic of computer retouching.

Now, computers have been used to alter images quite some time. Way back in 1989,

Oprah Winfrey’s head was put on Anne Margaret’s body for a TV Guide cover. Neither woman

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gave permission, by the way. And this happens all the time. So we might be looking at a TV

commercial and think we’re seeing one woman, but we’re really seeing four: one woman’s face,

another woman’s hair, another woman’s hands, another woman’s legs. Four or five women put

together to look like one perfect woman.

[Domenic Demasi from Wet Dreams and False Images]: “This was a cover for Lucky

magazine that we did, where it was four images to make one image. They preferred her over this

model, and we went ahead and pieced together a new girl as a result.”

Even the loveliest celebrities are transformed by computer. Kira Knightley’s given a

bigger bust. Jessica Alba is made smaller. Kelly Clarkson... Well, this is an interesting: it says

“Slim down your way,” but she in fact slimmed down the Photoshop way. You almost never see

a photograph of a woman considered beautiful that hasn’t been photoshopped.

[Ken Harris from Wet Dreams and False Images]: “Every picture has been worked on

some twenty, thirty rounds, going back and forth between the retouchers, and client, and the

agency. They are perfected to… to death.”

(7:30)

The Dove commercial called “Evolution” dramatically illustrates that the image is

constructed; it is not real. So the image isn’t real. It’s artificial; it’s constructed. But real women

and girls measure ourselves against this image every single day.

It’s an impossible ideal for just about everyone, but it’s absolutely impossible for women

who aren’t white. Women of color are generally considered beautiful only if they approximate

the white ideal. If they are light-skinned, have straight hair, Caucasian features. Even Beyoncé

had her skin lightened for this. But how often do we see an image like this? Black women are

often featured in jungle settings wearing leopard skins as if they are exotic animals.

Now the research is clear, that this ideal image of beauty effects women’s self-esteem.

How could it not? And it also influences how men feel about the very real women that they are

with. When men are shown photographs of supermodels in studies, they then judge real women

much more harshly.

We all grow up in a culture in which women’s bodies are constantly turned into things

into objects. Here she’s become the bottle of Michelob. In this ad she becomes part of a video

game. And this is everywhere, in all kinds of advertising. Women’s bodies turned into things,

into objects.

Now of course this effects female self-esteem. It also does something even more

insidious. It creates a climate in which there is wide-spread violence against women. I’m not at

all saying that an ad like this directly causes violence. It’s not that simple. But turning a human

being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person.

We see this with racism, we see it with homophobia, we see it with terrorism; it’s always the

same process. The person is dehumanized, and violence then becomes inevitable. And that step

is already and constantly taken with women. So the violence—the abuse—is partly the chilling

but logical result of this kind of objectification.

Now women are objectified in many ways. A Heineken commercial turns a woman into a

keg of beer. A frat boy’s dream.

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(10:00)

Women's bodies are dismembered in ads, hacked apart. Just one part of the body is

focused upon, which of course is the most dehumanizing thing you could do to someone.

Everywhere we look, women's bodies turned into things and often parts of things.

Most often when the body is dismembered, the focus is on breasts, since we are a culture

obsessed with breasts, and breasts are used to sell absolutely everything.

"The most dependable fishing line in the world." Fishing lines. Cameras. Women are

constantly told we must change our lives by increasing our breast size, and the stakes are high.

"Does your husband wish you had larger breasts?" And if he does, the implication of this

ad is very clear: you better change your body—as opposed to changing your husband. This is an

old ad, of course, but the message hasn't changed very much.

The marketing strategy of some bra makers, like Wonderbra, has been based on this idea

for years. This is the famous Eva Herzigova ad from the 1990s. More recently, they claim that

the breasts of this woman got so big that they cracked the glass on this display, or this ingenious

one, where the revolving street ad won't go to the next ad because the woman's breasts are too

big to get past the edge.

And when a new bra isn't enough, there's always surgery. "Meet the artists that created

the designer faces." In fact, there's been a dramatic increase in recent years in the amount of

cosmetic procedures, 91% of which are performed on women. From 1997 to 2007, these

procedures overall rose 457% to almost 12 million per year. This includes a 754% increase in

non-surgical procedures like Botox and laser treatments, mostly for the face, and a 114%

increase in actual surgeries like breast implants, liposuction and eyelid surgery, now more than 2

million a year. I've even heard of some parents giving their daughters breast implants as high

school graduation presents.

This ad for breast enhancement says, "You know that feeling when you find the perfect

fit, and we’re not talking jeans,” and gives some of the options available.

(12:30)

Now most women who have breast implants lose sensation in their breasts, so their

breasts become an object of someone else's pleasure rather than pleasurable in themselves. The

woman quite literally moves from being a subject to being an object. But women learn very early

on that our breasts are never going to be okay.

This ad ran in lots of women and teen magazines quite some time ago, but its message is

sadly current. This is the whole ad, and I'll read you the copy:

“Your breasts may be too big, too saggy, too pert, too fat, too full, too far apart, too close

together, too A-cup, too lopsided, too jiggly, too pale, too padded, too pointy, too pendulous, or

just two mosquito bites. But with Dep styling products at least you can have your hair the way

you want it.”

And of course according to this ad there is no way to have acceptable breasts. And girls

are getting the message these days so young that they need to be impossibly beautiful, hot, sexy,

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extremely thin. And they also get the message that they're going to fail, that there's no way to

really achieve it. Girls tend to feel fine about themselves when they're eight-, nine-, ten-years

old. But they hit adolescence, and they hit a wall. And certainly part of this wall is this terrible

emphasis on physical perfection.

Men's bodies are rarely dismembered in ads—more than they used to be, but still, it tends

to come as a shock. This ad ran quite some time ago in Vanity Fair and many other magazines.

All of these images are from the national mainstream media. But at the time when this ad ran, it

was so shocking that the ad itself got national media coverage. It's a good thing it got some

coverage I suppose.

Reporters called me up from all around the country and said, “Look they're doing the

same thing to men they've always done to women.” Well, not quite. They'd be doing the same

thing to men they've always done to women if there were copy with this ad that went like this:

“Your penis might be too small, too droopy, too limp, too lopsided, too narrow, too fat,

too pale, too pointy, too blunt, or just two inches. But at least you can have a great pair of jeans.”

It would never happen, nor should it, and believe me this is not the kind of equality I'm

fighting for. I don't want them to do this to man anymore than to women. But I think we can

learn something from these two ads. One of which did happen, one of which never would, and

what they show us very vividly is that men and women inhabit very different worlds.

(15:00)

Men basically don’t live in a world in which their bodies are routinely scrutinized,

criticized, and judged, whereas women and girls do. So, girls learn early on that they are going to

be judged first and foremost by how they look. This ad from a teen magazine said, “He said the

first thing he noticed was your great personality, he lied.”

So girls get the message its never going to be their great personality; it’s going to be how

they look in jeans. “Raising your hand is only one way to get attention in a 300 seat lecture hall.”

Basically we are told that women are only acceptable only if we are young, thin, white—or at

least light-skinned—perfectly groomed and polished, plucked and shaved, and any deviation

from this ideal is met with a lot of contempt and hostility.

Woman who are considered ugly are ridiculed in advertising campaigns such as this one

for premium light beer: “beer goggles number two,” and the point of this add is that the beer is

only 2.9%, so there is less danger that the man will hook up with an ugly woman.

So these ads are meant to be funny, but the message to girls and women is clear: if you

are not conventionally beautiful, you are an object of ridicule and contempt. Your worth depends

on how you look. You’re going to be graded on a curve.

This contempt for women who do not measure up is waiting for all of us, of course,

eventually as we age. So no wonder there is such terror at showing any signs of aging. And this

fear of aging starts so early. “Who knew by the age of fifteen your skin had already retired.”

How said that it’s all downhill after fifteen.

These days the greatest contempt is for the women who are considered in the least bit

overweight, and pop culture delights in ridiculing and mocking celebrities who’ve gained weight.

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The basic message to girls is the one 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 incredibly thin, and look at her body language. She looks as

if she’s trying to disappear, and I think this is the message that girls get, when they reach

adolescence, that they should disappear.

On the deepest level, the obsession with thinness is about cutting girls down to size, and

what could say this more vividly than this relatively new size in women’s clothing, size 0 and

size 00. Imagine a man going into a clothing store and asking for anything in a size 0. But our

girls are taught to aspire to become nothing.

(17:30)

So no wonder we have an epidemic of eating disorders in our country and increasingly

throughout the world. I’ve been talking about this for a very long time, and I keep thinking that

the models can’t get any thinner, but they do. They get thinner and thinner and thinner. This is

Ana Carolina Reston who died a year ago of anorexia weighing 88 pounds, and at the time she

was still modeling.

So the models literally cannot get any thinner. So Photoshop is brought to the rescue.

There was a lot of publicity recently around this image of model Filippa Hamilton being digitally

altered making her head bigger than her pelvis, an anatomical impossibility. This is what she

actually looks like. Soon after her contract was terminated, she claimed, “They fired me because

they said I was overweight and couldn’t fit in their clothes anymore.” So fashion designers think

this woman is too fat.

Even some of the editors of fashion magazines have become concerned recently.

Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, recently accused some of the world's leading

designers of pushing ever thinner models into the fashion magazines despite rising concerns

about eating disorders. What she said that designers send clothing that’s so small—size 00—that

most models, even thin models, cannot fit into these clothes, and so they have to use

extraordinarily thin models, and in fact she said that Vogue sometimes has to retouch photos

these days to make the models look larger than they actually are.

Recently there was a huge response to this tiny photo in an issue of Glamour magazine,

this tiny photo of a woman who has a little bit of a belly, and the editor of Glamour said that she

was flooded with emails from women filled with joy at seeing a woman like this in a fashion

magazine. Because basically the body type—the only one that we see is acceptable or

desirable—is one that fewer than 5% of American women have. This is genetic you can’t diet

yourself into this body type, at least not for long, any more than you can make yourself taller.

The models are very tall; they’re genetically thin. They pretty much have v-shaped bodies, broad

shoulders, narrow hips, long legs, and usually small breasts. When the models have large breasts,

almost always they’ve had implants because this is body type that usually doesn’t come with

large breasts

(20:00)

There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s a body type, but it excludes about 95% of all

women. Most women are more pear-shaped, heavier through the hips and thighs, but we literally

never see that body type as acceptable or desirable in advertising or anywhere in the popular

culture.

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Some ads today seem to encourage unhealthy attitudes, even eating disorders: “Exercise

was her appetizer; Fast food her main course.” And compulsive exercising is often a sign of an

eating disorder, and certainly exercising in order to eat junk food is a sign of trouble.

“Beauty knows no pain.” This ad actually suggests that if you’re in pain because of

squeezing yourself into tight clothes, the solution is to take a drug.

And celebrities often make things worse. Lady Gaga said recently, “It’s all about

starvation. Pop stars don’t eat.” Now this was Lady Gaga; she was probably being ironic, but

Kate Moss recently created quite a controversy when she said, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny

feels.”

There are exceptions, however. Kate Winslet has been outspoken about her refusal to

allow Hollywood to dictate her weight. When British GQ magazine published this photograph of

Winslet which was digitally enhanced to make her look dramatically thinner, she issued a

statement that the alterations were made without her consent, and she said, “I don’t look like

that, and more importantly, 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.” Bless her heart.

One result of this focus on thinness is that women are bombarded with ads for products

that promise weight loss. Ranging from diets such as Jenny Craig to drugs that promise a quick

and dramatic impact. “Eat all you want and still lose weight. That’s right! Eat all you want and

still lose weight. And we couldn’t say it on TV if it wasn’t true!”

These products, these diet products, are often dangerous. In fact, they can kill you, and at

best, they do not work. Ninety-five percent of dieters not only regain whatever weight they lose

within five years; they go on to gain more. Dieting is always a bad idea. Now I’m well aware of

the fact that obesity is a huge problem in our culture, that a third of adult Americans are obese,

two-thirds are overweight. The rates for kids are skyrocketing, but the solution isn’t to make our

girls hate themselves and starve themselves. Obesity is a very complicated problem. There’s a

huge genetic factor, and there are many other factors as well: racism, poverty, the amount of time

we spend in front of television sets, all of that.

(22:30)

But the solution to obesity and to the obsession with thinness are related in that they

involve the need to transform our attitudes as a culture about food and about the way we eat. But

that’s very difficult to do in a culture that teaches all of us, women especially, but men

increasingly, to hate our bodies.

In recent years, eating has become a moral issue for women. Women have been made to

feel ashamed of eating, ashamed of having an appetite for food, and language that used to

describe sexual activity now describes eating.

“Respect yourself in the morning.” This is kind of an amazing ad really. If you look at

this woman, she’s unbelievably thin, you can see her ribs. I want to beg her to eat those

croissants—she needs them. But the ad is clearly saying that if she does, she’s going to hate

herself in the morning. It used to be that respecting yourself in the morning had to do with sexual

activity, not what you had to eat the day before. But that’s all turned around, so if a woman

comes back from a weekend these days and says she was bad, we assume she broke her diet, not

that she did something unusual sexually. The ménage a trois we’re made to feel ashamed of was

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with Ben and Jerry. Now the more guilty women are made to feel about eating, the more erotic

ads for food become.

[Padma Lakshmi]: “I’ve always had a love affair with food. I think I’ve tasted every

flavor imaginable. But there’s something about the Western Bacon that reminds me of being in

high school, sneaking out before dinner to savor that sweet, spicy sauce and leaving no evidence

behind.”

We’re made to feel disconnected from our bodies, and then the advertisers offer us food as a way

to connect, as a way to have a kind of relationship.

“Smooth, Rich, and Good for you. If it were a man you’d marry him.”

Especially a romantic relationship.

“Your lips look so lonely. May I keep them company?” And the copy says, “The most

seductive cookie ever.”

What is going on here, this is a cookie!

“Watch TV with your arm around the one you love. It’s not your partner; it’s your bag of

Cheez-Its.”

(25:00)

“This is so beefy, your husband might get jealous.” And if your husband is jealous of the

pasta, I think you have bigger problems than this.

But after all, “No man’ll make you this happy.”

Sometimes food is sold quite deliberately as a substitute for sex: “You don’t unwrap it,

you undress it.” Again, a candy bar. You could have a ménage á trios with the cookie, I suppose.

“How bad do you want it?”

And “If you were any more satisfied you’d blush.”

Pretty amazing, but I have hundreds of ads like this.

As the media and advertising become global, the American image of ideal beauty is

everywhere, transforming cultural differences. So the modeling commercials, and in ads

throughout the world is young, thin, white, and usually blonde and blue eyed, no matter what

colors and shapes are the people looking on. Anne Becker’s famous study found a shape rise in

eating disorders among young women in Fiji soon after the introduction of television to the

culture.

Our popular culture seems to have the ability to make women anywhere and everywhere

feel absolutely terrible about themselves. But there’s far more going on than just an obsession

with thinness. Cutting girls down to size also means silencing them, and girls are often pictured

in ads, particularly in teen magazines, with their hands over their mouths or their mouths covered

in one way or another or with a copy like this: “Score high on nonverbal skills.”

[Commercial voiceover]: “Softcolors, let your eyes be heard, without making a sound.”

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The body language of girls is usually passive, vulnerable, and very different from the

body language of boys and men. Women are often shown in very silly poses, whereas men are

generally afforded dignity and strength, even as children.

Women are told that it’s sexy to be like a little girl. And grown women are infantilized in

many ways throughout advertising, fashion, and the popular culture in general. So we often get

grown women dressed like children or acting like children in one way or another. We also often

see models whose heads seem a little bigger than their bodies in a very childlike way.

(27:30)

Their eyes are very big, so very childlike features; although, they might be an adult

woman’s body. In this ad for Lee Jeans, I’m sure this model is over 18 but she’s certainly meant

to look as if she’s younger, and this is certainly meanly meant to invoke child pornography with

the man with the camera in the background, the popsicle, the whole thing.

Now the flip side is the increasing sexualization of little girls. And I started talking about

this way back in 1979, in the first version of Killing Us Softly, and this was one example that I

used then: “Love’s baby soft. Because innocence is sexier than you think.” But these images

have become much more extreme, and much more commonplace since. This is Miley Cyrus’

sister, Noah, who’s nine years old, and this is not a Halloween outfit; she was at a benefit, an

AIDS benefit. Padded bras and thong panties for seven year olds are now sold in major

department stores, and the latest product is high heels for babies! Before they can even walk!

Now not to leave boys out, there are t-shirts for toddlers that say things like “Pimp Squad.”

At the same time that we allow our children to be sexualized, we refuse to educate them

about sex. And our children pay a very high price. We have the highest rates of teen pregnancy

and the highest rates of sexually transmitted illnesses by far in the developed world. Children and

teens are awashed in sexual images and messages. Images that use to belong in the world of

pornography are now commonplace. This is an ad for jeans, although something seems to be

missing! Sex is also often presented as a dirty joke in advertising and throughout popular culture.

It’s a very juvenile approach to sex that we often see. “Don’t feel bad, our servers won't go down

on you either.”

And at the same time that we have these blatant sexual messages throughout the media,

there is no emphasis on relationships or on intimacy, and we have to fight to get accurate sex

education into our schools. The problem isn’t sex, it's the cultures pornographic attitude towards

sex. It’s the trivialization of sex, and nowhere is sex more trivialized than in advertising where

by definition it is used to sell everything.

(30:00)

“Hot! Too hot to cook. Now she was ready for something different. Noodle Bowls, from

Uncle Ben’s.”

One could argue, “oh sex has always been used to sell everything,” and, to a great extent,

that’s true. But it’s far more extreme and far more graphic and pornographic today than ever

before. This new Burger King ad for the super seven-incher. You know, people often say to me,

“You know, you’re reading too much into these ads.” I don’t think I’m reading too much into

this. Or this either for that matter.

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The truth is that sex is both more important and less important than our culture makes it

out be. It’s more important in that at its best it has meaning and mystery and emotional power.

And it’s less important in that it is by no means the most important aspect of life or of love. But a

visitor from another planet who just looked at our popular culture would have to come to two

conclusions. The first is that sex is really the only thing that matters. And the second is that sex

and sexuality belong only to the young and beautiful. If you’re not young and perfect looking,

you have no sexuality. And I think the ultimate impact of that is profoundly anti-erotic because it

makes people feel less desirable. It certainly makes women feel less desirable. How sexy can you

be if you hate your body? And I don’t think it does wonders for men, either.

Sex in advertising is also relentlessly heterosexist. Gay men barely exist outside of

publications targeting them. And the portrayal of lesbians almost always comes straight from the

world of porn. [Commercial voiceover]: “Haagen Daaz. Too much chocolate.”

The internet has given everyone easy access to pornography. Pornography these days is

not just accessible; it’s really inescapable and, therefore, more acceptable. And the language and

the images of porn have become mainstream. Porn has become cool, edgy. Lauren Phoenix star

of scores of porn films sells tube socks to teens in American Apparel ads. And porn queen Jenna

Jameson has launched her own fashion line. Young celebrities emulate the porn stars. Here we

have Miley Cyrus doing a pole dance at a music awards ceremony.

(32:30)

So girls are encouraged to present themselves as strippers and porn stars, to wear thongs,

which basically are G-strings, to remove their pubic hair, to send nude photographs of

themselves to their boyfriends via their cell phones, to be sexually available while expecting

little or nothing in return. As girls learn from a very early age that their sexualized behavior and

appearance are often rewarded by society, they learn to sexualize themselves, to see themselves

as objects.

They’re encouraged to this as their own choice, as a declaration of empowerment, to

reframe presenting oneself in the most clichéd and stereotypical way possible as a kind of

liberation.

“You have the right to remain sexy,” but what this is really saying is you have the right to

be an object, to be passive, to have your sexuality defined in a rigid, shallow, limiting and

clichéd way. When the culture offers girls and women only one way to be sexy, it can hardly be

considered an authentic choice to choose it.

Advertisers always find ways to turn any movement for radical change into just another

way to push a product. Some of the ads in my collection from years ago, co-opted and trivialized

the Women’s Movement.

“Relax and enjoy the revolution.” This is an ad for flavored douches.

“So you are out to change the world. We can do it together.” And this is an ad for shoe

polish.

Most notorious of all of course was the Virginia Slims campaign, with the slogan,

“You’ve come a long way baby.” And what we learned is that women who smoke like men, die

like men. Feminism’s individual self-expression is more likely to sell baubles and Botox than it

is to do what we set out to do so many years ago, which is to change the world.

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Now I want to be very clear, that there is nothing wrong with wanting to be attractive and

sexy. Just about everybody wants this. What’s wrong is that this is emphasized for girls and

women at incredibly young ages at the exclusion of other important qualities and aspects. Being

hot becomes the most important measure of success.

[Commercial voiceover]: “Ecko denim. Hot girls make great clothes.”

[Commercial voiceover]: “It’s the hottest thing to ever come out of Taco Bell.”

And this extremely superficial and limited definition of sexiness makes most women feel

insecure and vulnerable and much less sexy.

(35:00)

In 2007, the American Psychological Association released a report concluding that girls

exposed to sexualized images from a young age, are more prone to three of the most common

mental health problems, for girls and women: depression, eating disorders, and low self-esteem.

In spite of all the graphic sexual messages in the media that urge girls and young women

to be hot, and sexy, there’s still a powerful double standard, with very different rules and

consequences for females and males. Girls are constantly told by the popular culture that they

should be sexy, but innocent. Experienced, but virginal. As many of us know, this is tricky.

This ad kind of exemplifies that. It’s an ad for BMW. There’s this very young, girl,

really, and the copy says: “You know you’re not the first.”

Females have long been categorized as either virgins or whores, of course. What’s new is

that girls are now supposed to embody both within themselves. This creates an impossible

double-bind. In the same way that the girdles and the corsets of the past have been replaced by

an internalized standard even more suffocating, so the sexual repression of the past has been

replaced by something, in some ways, even more demanding, and constricting.

But all of these sexual images aren’t intended to sell us on sex. They’re intended to sell us on

shopping. They’re designed to promote consumerism, not just in childhood, but throughout our

lives. One of the major ways advertising accomplishes this, is by linking sex and products, of

course, and by sexualizing products. Not only are people objectified in ads, but products are

sexualized. We’re encouraged to feel passion for our products rather than our partners.

[Woman in an ad]: “I just want to eat you up!”

[Woman in an ad]: “Look I really like you, but you’re giving me mixed signals.”

This is an amazing ad that ran not long ago in some of the upscale glossy women’s

magazines, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar. This young man is kneeling in front of this extremely thin

woman, again we don’t see her face, that’s irrelevant. Her pubic hair has been shaved into the

Gucci logo. He is worshipping Gucci; she has morphed into Gucci. So this is a prime example of

the way that products are sexualized—people and products become the same. As is this.

(37:30)

Now, another thing that has changed dramatically in recent years has been the increase in

ads that objectify men. So we certainly do see many more ads, not nearly to the extent that we do

with women, but we see many more ads that we did before, of men as sex objects. But there’s a

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world of difference when men are objectified and when women are objectified. When men are

objectified, they generally are bigger, stronger, more powerful. When women are objectified,

we’re more fragile, more vulnerable, less powerful. But more important, there really aren’t

consequences for men as a result of this objectification. Because men don’t live in a world in

which they are likely to be raped, harassed or beaten, or at least straight white men don’t live in

such a world, whereas women and girls do.

A much more serious problem for men is that masculinity is so often linked with

violence. And boys grow up in a world in which men are constantly shown as perpetrators of

violence, as brutal. They grow up in a world in which they are encouraged to be tough and

insensitive. “You talkin’ to me?” Well this is a joke of course, but this is also a baby. And

certainly boys still get the message early on that talking, communicating is seen as a weakness in

them often.

“Do you want to be the one she tells her deep dark secret to or do you want to be her deep

dark secret?” Well the ad is of course saying to the man you want to be her deep dark secret, but

the truth is if you’re a man who wants an intimate relationship with a woman, and most men do,

you better be the one she tells her deep dark secrets to because it’s impossible to have an intimate

relationship, a successful one, without being vulnerable, without communicating. So this ad is

actually a kind of blueprint for a disastrous relationship.

So the image of man is certainly distorted too but in a very different way from the image

of women. But the negative and distorted image of women deeply affects not only how men feel

about women but how men feel about everything that gets labeled feminine in themselves.

“You’re looking at my feminine side.” And he’s of course referring to the girly tattoo on

his bicep. But what the ad is saying to young men—this is a cigarette ad its aimed at teenagers

and young men—it’s saying to them you better not have a feminine side. There better not be

anything about you that could be in the least bit considered feminine. So what it’s expressing is

not only contempt for women but contempt for all things considered feminine. And human

qualities, qualities that we all share, that we all need, that we all have the potential to develop,

get divided up and polarized and labeled masculine and feminine, and then the feminine is

consistently devalued, which causes women to devalue ourselves and each other. And it causes

men to devalue not only women but also all those qualities that get labeled feminine by the

culture.

(40:00)

By that I mean qualities like compassion, cooperation, empathy, intuition, sensitivity. We

may give lip service to these qualities, but they are very low priority in our society, and men are

still very rigidly socialized to repress these human qualities in themselves, at enormous costs to

all of us.

Now when you have this kind of definition of femininity, the passive submissive

definition, and this kind of brutal image of masculinity, inevitably of course this leads to

violence. It leads to violence in real life, and we see certainly see a great deal of violent images

throughout the popular culture. There’s been a trend in recent years that I call “the romantic

stranger.” In these ads the woman is outdoors alone; there’s a shadowy figure lurking in the

background; and always the idea is that a romance is about to take place. This one says, “Let the

adventure begin.” Now I think I speak for most women here today when I say that when I’m

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outdoors alone, and there’s a shadowy figure lurking in the background, romance is the last thing

on my mind. So what this does and ads like this do is they eroticize violence.

The research is absolutely clear that violent images affect us. There is no doubt about

that. These violent images make some people more aggressive. They desensitize just about

everybody. They make some people more likely to blame the victim. And the most dangerous

thing to do is to eroticize violence. When you link sex with violence that’s the most dangerous,

and that of course happens over and over again. So often it’s hard to tell if this is an embrace or

is it an attack.

Many ads these days’ feature women in bondage, symbolic or otherwise. Some ads

normalize and trivialize battering, and battering is the single greatest cause of injury to women in

America. Some ads even seem to depict murder, and one-third of all the women who are

murdered in our country are killed by their male partners, their husbands. Now this is a terrible

fact for all of us, but until we face it, we’re not going to be able to do anything about it.

The truth is most men are not violent. Overwhelming most men are not violent, but many

men are afraid to speak out against it, are afraid to support women, are afraid to challenge other

men.

So what can we do about all of this? Well the first step is to become aware, to pay

attention, and to recognize that this affects all of us. These are public health problems that I’m

talking about.

(42:30)

The obsession with thinness is a public health problem, the tyranny of the ideal image of

beauty, violence against women. These are all public health problems that affect us all, and

public health problems can only be solved by changing the environment. We need a lot of citizen

activism, education, discussion, media literacy. We need to work together to change the norms

and change the attitudes.

People often ask me what gives me hope, given how long I’ve been doing this and how

little has changed. As I said before, I feel hopeful because I’m no longer alone, and I'm hopeful

because there have been some signs of progress around the world. Some things have happened

that I wouldn’t have believed possible 30 or 40 years ago when I was first talking about this and

trying to get people to take it seriously.

In Madrid in 2006, the fashion industry said they would stop using models below a

certain body mass index. Recently, Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s magazine

announced that it’s going to stop using professional models entirely in its pages and will only use

real-life women instead.

And very recently politicians in the European Union have proposed a series of measures

including labeling digitally altered models, encouraging diverse and healthy body sizes in all

models, and teaching media literacy in the schools. And it’s important to encourage and support

such steps.