Blog Post #8

This week in class we watched Jean Kilbourne’s film, “Killing us Softly 4”, that showed us how sexists ads are to women. Many ads demean women and do not represent any sort of respect we deserve. Another thing in advertisement is the type of girls that are modeling. They find very skinny girls but after that, they still recreate their body image using digital processes. The ads try to tell us what we should look like when in reality those women do not even exist.

            The ad I found was a model from Victoria Secret posing for a bathing suit advertisement(shown at the bottom). This picture has the women on her knees which Kilbourne mentioned in her film that girls are always posed as inferior humans. They are always laying down, on their knees, or wrapped around themselves in some sort of way. This picture also sets the bar extremely high of how girls should look in a bikini. Ads try to sell us “normalcy”, as Kilbourne put it. They try to tell us who we are and who we should be. This image of beauty is false and the obsession with thinness is increasing because of what type of advertisement is out there. Another thing Kilbourne mentioned is how sex seems to be the most important thing in advertisement and is now becoming everything. What kind of role does this play in society for girls? In this picture, boys probably rave over this and expect this sexy look from girls on the beach. Since this look is nearly impossible to achieve, the consequences for girls are endless. Young women are victims to diseases such as eating disorders and depression like Kilbourne said and it all starts with advertisements like these.