Killing Us Softly, is the third part in three films by Jean Kilbourne. Her first film was in 1979, then 1987, and finally 1999. They all are about Advertising and the effects it has on women and the way advertisements show women.
During the film, she showed clips from magazine articles, television commercials, and other forms of advertisements and the way women were portrayed. The clips that were shown were everyday ads that we would all see on tv, or billboards. It was rather shocking to see the images in these ads. First of all the women were being hyper-sexualized, which was especially disturbing when it was young teens or young women. No matter what age of the women, unless you were over age 50, you were displayed as a sex object. The advertisements keep increasing the way to objective women. As terrible as the Ad industry is, we are the ones who continually buy the products. Unless we stop giving in, it just turns into a vicious cycle again. It is our time to stand up, no woman should have to deal with being objectified especially in the media.
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Gloria Steinem has a great article about ads in women's magazines. She describes her efforts in creating Ms. Magazine, which tried to take a contentious approach to the advertisements in its publications, and the difficulty in overcoming the sexism embedded in consumer products and marketing. It's good stuff.
It's also fun to think about the "male gaze" (see Laura Mulvey) in terms of ads. This conception basically holds that women in visual representations (e.g. films, ads, etc.) are objectified for men's pleasure and that this reinforces men's unequal power. In this way, men "consume" women visually. It's from the 1970s and has justifiably been complicated in the intervening years, but it's a really interesting theory.
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