The naked truth 广告中的女性形象.docxVIP

The naked truth: Advertisings Image of WomenBY Jean Kilbourne Lafayette College April 5, 2014.I started collecting ads and talking about the image of women in advertising in the late 1960s. As far as I know, I was the first person to do this. I tore ads out of magazines, put them on my refrigerator. And gradually I began to see a pattern in the ads, a kind of statement about what it meant to be a woman in the culture. I put together a slide presentation and began travelling around the country. In 1979, I made my first film, Killing Us Softly, Advertisings Image of Women, which I have remade three times since then. These are some of the ads in my original collection, long time ago. “Feminine odor is everyones problem.” “If your hair is not beautiful, the rest hardly matters.” “Honey, your anti-perspirant spray just doesnt do it.” And “Id probably never be married now, if I havent lost 49 pounds”, which one woman told me, it was the best advertisement for fat shed ever seen. I am gonna do a very abbreviated version of this talk, of course, today. But I want to begin with the question that I most often got asked, which is, “how did you get into this?” “What got you started?” Many factors in my life lead to this interest. I became active in the second wave of womens movement right away in the late 1960s. I worked in media; I spent a year in London working for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and a year in Pairs, working for a French film company. This sounds more glamourous than it was, I was a secretary. In those days, options for women were very limited. I was a secretary, I was a waitress, but I did have one other option that I rarely talk about. I was encouraged to enter beauty pageants and to model. This is artfully cropped to make it as if I won. I was in fact the runner-up. This was my first ad, and I think the car tells you something about how long ago this was. And this ran in a London newspaper. So modelling was one of the very few ways that a woman can make money in those ways. It was very seductive. But for me, it was also alienating, it was soul-destroying, there was a whole of sexual harassment that came with the territory. So I didnt follow that path. But it left me with a lifelong interest in the whole idea of beauty and the power of the image. Since that time, advertising has become much more widespread and powerful, and sophisticated than ever before. Babies at the age of six months can recognize corporate logos, and that is the age which marketers are now starting to target our children. At the same time, just about everyone feels personally exempt from the influence of advertising. So wherever I go, what I hear more than anything else is “oh, I dont pay attention to ads, I just tune them out, they have no effect on me.” I hear this most often from people wearing Abercrombie T-shirts. But that is another story.The influence of advertising is quick, cumulative, and for the most part subconscious. Ads sell more than products. Now in many ways, weve obviously come a long way, but from my perspective of over 40 years, the image of women in advertising is worse than ever. The pressure on women to be young, thin, beautiful is more intense than ever before. Its always been impossible. Years ago, the supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford”. She couldnt; of course, no one can look like this. But it is really impossible today, because of the magic of the Photoshop, which can turn this woman into this woman, and then try to make us believe that an anti-aging cream can do this. Now she is a beautiful woman, but older women are considered attractive in our culture only in so far as we stay looking impossibly young. We learn to read mens and womens faces very differently. Here we have Brad Pitt and former supermodel Linda Evangelista about the same age, each one of them in an ad for Chanel, but he gets to look like a human being, but she is transformed into a cartoon. Now sometimes every now and then, a celebrity resists, and as you may know, just this week Laurel sent out a tweet with an unretouched photograph below the Photoshop version. And she tweeted, “remember, flaws are OK. “Good for her, but this doesnt happen very often. Men are Photoshopped too, but when men are Photoshopped, they are made bigger. Andy Roddick laughed when he saw the bulked up arms on this cover photo, and suggested they should be returned to the man they belong to. The obsession with thinness is worst than ever because of Photoshop, her head is bigger than her pelvis, and this is an anatomical impossibility. The actual model for this ad was fired for being too fat. And they used Photoshop to create this freakish畸形的 image. More recently they use Photoshop to remove the “dreaded thigh gap”, unfortunately, they also removed a very important part of her body. So the image is impossible for everyone, but particularly for women of color, who are considered beautiful only in so far as they resemble the white ideals, light skin, straight hair, Caucasian白种的 features, round eyes. Even Beyonces skin is lightened in ads. The image isnt real. It is artificial, it is constructed, it is impossible. But real women and girls measure ourselves against it every single day. Of course, it affects female self-esteem, and it affects how men feel about the very real women in their lives. Womens bodies are dismembered in ads and ad after ad for all kinds of products. And sometimes the body is not only dismembered; it is assaulted as in this amazing ad that ran quite a few years in lot of women and teen magazines. This is the whole ad, and I will read you the copy. Your breasts may be too big, too saggy下垂的, too pert, too flat, too full, too fall apart, too close together, too A cup, too lopsided不平, too jiggly摇晃的, too pale, too padded有装填垫料的, too pointy, too pendulous摇摆的 or just two mosquito bites. But with Dep styling products, at least you can have the hair the way you want it. It is ludicrous滑稽的, but this ran in teen magazines, teen magazines target 12-year-old girls, here they are saying to 12-year-olds girls, here they are saying to 12-year-olds girls, your breasts will never be OK. So our girls are getting the message today so young, that they have to be incredibly thin and beautiful and hot and sexy, and they are going to fail, because there is no way to measure up to this impossible ideal. The self-esteem of girls in America often plummets（价格、水平等）骤然下跌 when they reach adolescence. Girls tend to feel fine about themselves at their eight, nine, ten years old, but they hit adolescence they often hit a wall. And certainly part of this wall is this terrible emphasis on physical perfection. Mens body are very rarely dismembered in ads, more than it used to be, but still it tends to come as a shock. This ad ran about twenty years ago in Vanity Fair. These are often national mainstream media, and it was one of the first examples of turning into sex objects. But when this ad ran about twenty years ago, the ad was so shocking, that the ad itself got national media coverage, its a good thing it got some coverage, I suppose. Reporters called me up from all around the country and said, “look, they are doing the same thing to men they have always done to women.” well, not quite, they would be doing the same thing to men they have always done to women, if there were copy with this ad that went like this:Your penis may be too small, too lean, too limp, too droopy, too lopsided, too narrow, too fat, too pale, too pointy; too blunt or just two inches, but at least you can have a great pair of jeans. It would never happen or should it, and believe me, this is not the kind of equality that I am fighting for. I dont want them to do this to men any more than to women. But I think we can learn something from these two ads. One of which did happen and one of which never would, and what they show us vividly is that men and women inhabit very different worlds.Men basically dont live in a world, in which, they are, well, let me move on to another. They are stereotypes that harm men of course, but they tend to be less personal, less related to the body. However, men are objectified more than they used to be, but there really arent consequences as a result of that. Men dont live in a world in which they are likely to be raped, harassed or beaten, at least straight white man dont live in such a world, whereas women and girls do. When women are objectified, there is always the threat of sexual violence, there is always intimidation, there is always the possibility of danger, and women live a world defined by threat, whereas men simple do not. The body language of women and girls remains passive, vulnerable, submissive, and very different from the body language of men and boys. And probably the best way to illustrate that is to put a man in a traditionally feminine pose. It becomes obviously trivializing and absurd. Grown women are often infantilized in ads, and increasingly little girls are sexualized. Now I have been talking about this for decades, I wrote a book about it and it is getting worse. This little girl is nine, and this is happening in a culture in which there is widespread sexual abuse of children. Images like this dont cause this problem, but they certainly normalized very dangerous attitudes towards children. Padded bras and thongs panties are sold for seven-year-olds in major department stores, and in the latest product, high heels for babies, not to leave boys out, you can get T-shirts for your toddlers, that says things like “ pimp 皮条客；男妓squad”. So boys are sexualized too, although in a very different way than girls. Boys are encouraged to look at girls as sex objects; boys are encouraged to be sexually precocious. And boys are learned to be tough and invulnerable, basically starting in infancy. Basically we allow our children to be sexualized, but we refuse to educate them about sex. The United States is the only developed nation in the world that doesnt teach sex education in its schools. But our kids are getting sex education, they are getting massive doses of it, but they are getting it from advertising, the media, and the popular culture. This is an ad for jeans although something seems to be missing. But each one of these ads for major, international products, major mainstream media, very graphic大胆的. The problem isnt sex. It is the cultures pornographic attitude towards sex, the trivialization of sex. And nowhere is sex more trivialized than in advertising, where by definition, it is used to sell everything. Whatever you are giving him tonight, hell enjoy it more with rice. I dont think I am particular nave, but I havent figured it out yet what the hell you do with rice. Maybe it is wild rice. One woman shouted out she just hoped it wasnt Minute Rice. So this is an old ad of course, you can say “sex is always used to sell”, and that is true, but it is far more graphic and pornographic today than ever before. And just to illustrate that, Im gonna show you just an old ad using, this is an old ad, using sex to sell food. And this is a current one, Burger King, “the super seven incher, itll blow your mind away”. For a mainstream product, as is this one. Now all of these images I think are actually, profoundly anti-erotic, because in advertising and the popular culture, sexuality belongs only to the young and beautiful. If you are not young and perfect looking, you have no sexuality. And this makes most people feel less desirable, how sexy can a woman feel if she hates her body? The internet is giving us all easy access to pornography these days, and as porn becomes more available and acceptable, the language and the images of porn become mainstream. Young celebrities emulate the porn stars, and these days you can get your little girl a pole dancing doll. Girls are encouraged to present themselves as strippers and porn stars, to remove their pubic hair, and to be sexually available while expecting little or nothing in return. And at the same time, they are assaulted. “Taste great, goes down easy”. As girls learn to sexualize themselves, as they learn their sexual behavior will be awarded, they learn to be sexualize themselves. To see themselves as objects, these images cause real harm to real girls and women. Girls expose to sexualized images from a young age are more prone to eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem. Inevitably, the objectification leads to violence. And that has become much more extreme too. Advertising often normalizes and trivializes battering, sexual assault, and even murder. The truth is most men arent violent; overwhelmingly most men are not violent. But many men are afraid to speak up, are afraid to support women, and are afraid to challenge other men. And I have great admiration for those men who do. These ads dont directly cause violence against women, but they normalize dangerous attitudes, and they create a climate in which women are often seen as things, as objects. And certainly, turning a human being into