Let's Talk About...

17. Media & advertising: butts, breasts and blowjobs

"Your breast may be too big, too saggy, too pert, too flat, too full, too far apart, too close together, too A cup, too lopsided, to 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."

After discussing how porn shapes gender identity and sexuality, I will now take a look at how advertising impacts us. The copy above is from an ad that ran in teen magazines targeted at 12-year old girls. Filmmaker and speaker Jean Kilbourne presented it in a TED Talk based on her documentary Killing us Softly: Avertising's Image of Women. Since the 1960s, Kilbourne has been researching how women are seen through ads. They don't simply sell products and services. Like porn, they make a statement about what it means to be a woman or a man. Such statement influences how women and men view themselves and the opposite gender.

In her early ad collection, Kilbourne had pieces that stated things like "Feminine odor is everyone's problem", "If your hair isn't beautiful the rest hardly matters" and "I'd probably never be married now, hadn't I lost 49 pounds." Since then, advertising has become much more widespread, powerful and sophisticated, to the point that 6-month babies can recognize corporate logos— that's the age at which marketers now target children. In her lectures across the US, Kilbourne kept hearing people say, "I don't pay attention to ads, I just tune out and they don't affect me."

People think if they don't pay attention they won't be affected by ads. That's a naïve assumption.

"The influence of advertising is quick, cumulative and, for the most part, subconscious," Kilbourne ponders. "Ads sell more than products." After more than 40 years of research, she concludes that the image of women in advertising is worse than ever. The pressure on women to be young, thin and beautiful is tremendous. In fact it has been and still is an ideal impossible to attain when you have models photoshoped to perfection. Kilbourn quotes supermodel Cindy Crawford, who once stated: "I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford."

Anti-aging creams with photoshopped women convince us that products can remove ten years from one's face, or that a woman can be so thin her head is larger than her waistline—an anatomical impossibility. In our culture, older women are considered attractive only if they look forever young, and a woman is only considered attractive if she is thin like the models in magazines. It's even harder for black women living under the dictatorship of white beauty ideal.

The image isn't real: it's artificial, constructed and impossible to attain. Yet real women and girls measure themselves against it every day. Obviously, it affects female self-esteem, and it also affects how men feel about the real women in their lives. Women's bodies are dismembered in ads—ad after ad—for all kinds of products. Not only the female body is dismembered: sometimes is openly or subliminally insulted.

Just like in the ad in the beginning of this post. Now can someone explain to me why breasts are the focal point for selling hair products?

That ad tells girls their breasts will never be good enough, all the while imposing that girls at least  must have "good" hair. Younger and younger girls are getting the message that they have to be incredibly thin and beautiful and hot and sexy, and then they're going to fail because there's no way to measure up to this unrealistic ideal. The self-esteem of girls in the US—and all countries colonized by the American mass media for that matter—plummets when they reach adolescence and are faced with this absurd emphasis on physical perfection.

On a previous post, I mentioned that not even the very symbol of their womanhood is left alone. Now, thanks to porn, girls as early as 12 want to have their vulvas surgically "corrected" to look like those of porn stars. Also thanks to porn, boys have learned to expect female genitals to be just like that.