In the original Killing Us Softly, I said that I will be asking of you something
that no one has ever asked before, and that is to take advertising seriously.
These days we do take advertising more seriously. Advertising has increased from
a 20 billion dollar a year to a 180 billion dollar a year
industry. The average American is exposed to over 3,000 ads every single day and will
spend three years of his or her life watching television commercials - just the
commercials. The ads as you know are everywhere. They're on radio, television
newspapers, magazines, billboards, bumper stickers, here one company brags about
its ability to put advertising in your face all over the place. And at the same
time everyone in America still feels personally exempt from the influence of
advertising. So wherever I go, what I hear more than anything else is 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 gap T-shirts but that's another story.
It certainly is true; in fact it's more true than ever that advertising is the
foundation of the mass media. The primary purpose of the mass media is to sell
products. Advertising does sell products of course but it also sells a great deal
more than products. It sells values. It sells images, it sells concepts of love and
sexuality, of romance, of success, and perhaps most important of normalcy. To a
great extent advertising tells us who we are and who we should be. What does
advertising tell us today about women?
It tells us just as it did ten and twenty and thirty years ago that what's
most important about women is how we look. The first thing the advertisers do
is surround us with the image of ideal female beauty. So we all learned how
important it is for a woman to be beautiful and exactly what it takes.
Women learn from a very early
age that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy and above all, money
striving to achieve this ideal 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. Women's bodies continue to be dismembered in
advertising over and over again. Just one part of the body is used to sell
products which is of course the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone.
Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on.
Most often the focus is on breasts, since we are a culture that is certainly obsessed with breasts.
And breasts are used to fill absolutely everything. The most dependable fishing
line in the world. 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 is very clear. You better
change your body as opposed to changing your husband. Basically we're told that
women are acceptable only if we're young, thin, white, beautiful, carefully groomed and
polished and any deviation from that ideal is met with a lot of contempt and
hostility. You never thought you'd lose your looks, either. Look at the kind of
real contempt that there is for this woman who is portrayed as completely
valueless now. These days the greatest contempt is for women who are considered
in the least bit overweight, as in this classic, "I'd probably never be married now
if I hadn't lost 49 pounds!" which one woman told me was the best advertisement
for fat she'd ever seen.
The primary message that young women and girls get in our culture today is the message in this ad.
At the top it says the more you subtract the more you add. What a horrible message.
The more you subtract the more you add. At least one in five young women in
America today has an eating disorder, the most common of which are anorexia and
bulimia. And if you think of an eating disorder as any kind of disordered
attitude towards eating and one's appetite,
it's probably closer to four out of five. Now where else could this image of thinness come from
if not at least in part from the media images that surround us and that tell us
in order to be acceptable we need to be painfully, unnaturally thin. No wonder we
have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world. In general
teenagers are hyper sexualized in our culture today. Here a young woman, very
young, very thin, walking down the street
envisioning herself in black lace. A magazine for young women and girls
called Jane has on the cover an article, 15 Ways Sex Makes You Prettier. There
continue to be lots of ads that normalize and trivialize battering and
battering is the single greatest cause of injury to women in America. Imagine an
ad like this with a woman being shot, trivializing copy like this, great hair
never dies. Advertising is one powerful force that keeps us trapped in very
rigid roles and in very crippling definitions of femininity and
masculinity. We need to get involved in whatever way moves us to change, not just
the ads but these attitudes that run so deep in our culture and that affect each
one of us so deeply whether we're conscious of it or not. Because what's at
stake for all of us, men and women, boys and girls, is our ability to have
authentic and freely chosen lives. Nothing less.