RR#3: Kilbourne

                In an exert from Kilbourne’s 1999 piece, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, Kilbourne describes the effect that media and advertising have on female’s in  America; she explains their effect on how a woman views her sexuality, and how we, Americans, view sexuality in general. Kilbourne employs well used and well known arguments to describe the adverse effects mass media has on American culture, demonizing America’s media and marketing industries, stressing their corruption, immorality and their devaluation of family values. However, Kilbourne specifically stresses how the utilization of sexuality by large corporations in mass media is objectifying and dehumanizing to the role of women in society, and is an unjustified means for selling a product. Kilbourne uses a lot of primary source ads to demonstrate her cases; she interprets said advertisements in very perverse and negative ways, making sure to demonstrate how each image and slogan could be taken to have very negative and insulting implications towards the female gender, and plows through a number of advertisements in an identical and similar manner.

Kilbourne describes the appeal of using bondage, sexual aggression, and rape in advertising as attractive due to its ability to link these things with the possession of the product being advertised, or, as Kilbourne puts it, “…it fetishizes products, imbues them with an erotic charge-”, along with the charge put upon the product being advertised, Kilbourne also suggests that the roles that each gender portrays in the advertisements that sell said product are, in a way, being sold as well. Kilbourne suggests that the advertisements that are being put out in which the sexualization of both males and females are included in pursuit of selling a product, are, in fact, condoning certain behaviors of said males’ and females’ sexuality, making those behaviors more sellable and appealing whilst doing similarly for the product. Kilbourne suggests that these advertisements, by displaying women in such weak and submissive ways, and by being as successful as they are in selling their product by doing so, are also very successful in their ability to sell women aspiration to become weak and submissive and to acquire those attributes just like they were able to acquire the product that was advertised.

          The pictures of ads Kilbourne put alongside her writing were irrefutably suggestive of male dominance and exploitation of women’s sexuality and bodies, and included incredibly violent and shocking images of women at gun point and looking vulnerable, scared, and weak. My original reaction to the pieces was that the images were ludicrous, indecent, and unacceptable. For the most part I felt disassociated and very objectively towards the ads, I not feel as if I could relate to the women in the ads and their air of absolute powerlessness and defenselessness. That’s not to say that I wasn’t able to understand the origin of those feelings, but my predisposition to the effects that advertisements and media are intended to have on the individuals that they’re directed at.