Killing us softly 4 transcript

You could use Google or other search engines to find ads, billboard images, movie posters, etc; you could look through actual print copies of magazines that you own or otherwise have access to; you could use the links below to access online archives:

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess/ -- a collection of historical ads from Duke University Library

adflip.com/ -- an archive of classic print ads

http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/ -- collection of vintage ads

Some helpful hints for finding images:

1. The images you choose MUST be ones that were produced by actual, legitimate companies and circulated in mainstream media for real commercial purposes. All of Katz's and Kilbourne's images come from mainstream commercial sources, so your images should come from such sources as well. Please do not choose images that have already been discussed in Katz's or Kilbourne's videos or in the sample student papers posted on Blackboard.

2. You'll have to submit your chosen images this week. So, when you find images that are interesting to you, please be sure to save them to your computer. If you choose images from actual print magazines (as opposed to those found in electronic databases), you'll need to scan the images so that you have electronic copies of them.

3. BEFORE you begin searching for images, please re-read the assignment description to remind yourself of your goal and purpose.

4. Since your primary goal in Project #2 is to apply Kilbourne's or Katz's ideas to two specific images, and since their ideas focus on representations of PEOPLE, be sure to find images that actually have people in them (or at least people-like characters--for instance, an ad that shows a stick of gum shaped as a woman). You'll have more success with this assignment if your images actually use people in them!

5. Remember that your two images need to have something in common--maybe they're movie posters for similar types of movies. Or maybe they're ads for the exact same product but for different ad campaigns in different magazines. Just be sure NOT to choose two images that have nothing to do with each other--like an ad for a car, and an ad for shaving cream.

6. If you want, you could choose images from two different time periods--e.g., an ad for a weight-loss supplement from the 1950s and one from today. In the past, students have had a lot of fun with this kind of approach!

After your instructor receives your ads in your weekly work submission, he/she will review, comment on, and "approve" them (i.e., tell you whether he/she thinks your images will work for the project).

After you've decided on the media images you'd like to focus on for Project #2, please write out responses to the questions below.
Writing out these responses will help you (and your instructor!) determine whether you've chosen appropriate images for this assignment.
1. What specific images have you chosen? Are they ads? Billboards? Movie posters? Something else?

2. Where did you find these images (what specific online site, or what print publication)? Don't just say "google images"--give the specific site.

3. Do these images actually portray people in some way--in the images presented and/or in the wording that accompanies the images?

4. Do these images have something in common (e.g., they're both ads for a similar kind of product; they promote a similar kind of message, etc.)? Explain the commonality you see in your images.

5. Off the top of your head, name one idea of Jean Kilbourne's or Jackson Katz's (from their videos) that you think applies to these images--and briefly explain how that idea applies. (For example, maybe you've found movie posters that illustrate Katz's ideas about the normalization of violence in contemporary media. Or maybe you've found ads that contradict Kilbourne's ideas about the obsession with thinness in contemporary advertising.)

6. Overall, why have you chosen these particular images to focus on?

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