Jean Kilbourne Lecture

After attending Jean Kilbourne's lecture monday night, I just wanted to call up a bunch of advertising companies and scream into the phone. Don't worry, I didn't. But all the messages being sent are just incredibly frustrating. And while the campaign has come a long way, I don't feel like we're getting anywhere very fast. There are still far to many people struggling with eating disorders and just body image in general. But are we really surprised when models' bodies aren't even worthy of skipping photoshop? It kills me that messages are being sent out that women's skin retires after age fifteen, that their breasts will never be optimal, or that pretty faces must be "designed", and no one is doing anything about it. I was stunned that within just three years of TV coming to Fiji that eating disorders doubled, and that vast majorities of women were dieting and an even larger majority saw themselves as "too large." But I think what stuns me even more is that society takes it as normal. There still exists this terrible double standard. Proof for this is when an ad featuring a man's bare abs and thighs gains National media coverage. Of course, as Kilbourne underlined, I don't want men to be objectified either, but when a picture of a man's abs gains national attention over the epidemic of eating disorders or ads featuring men beating women, then there is definitely a serious problem. While I am glad that companies like Dove are beginning to take a stand and change, I wish that more companies would do the same.

The Representation of Women's Body Types in the Media is Killing us Softly

Something that really stood out to me in many of the advertisements that Jean Kilbourne showed in her presentation last night is women's body image and how even the thinnest models are photo shopped, and not even those models could ever really look like the end-result photographs of themselves.  It is scary to think about the fact that the media affects us so much when it comes to body image, and especially affects young girls all around the world.  It is really interesting to me that when Jean Kilbourne started talking to people about the issues of the representations of women in advertisements, it was a very new topic that was not discussed by many others.  Today there are a many people who focus on this subject and she is no longer alone, yet the media continues to feed us images of unattainable body types and sexualized women seen as objects in advertisements.  It makes me question when the media will finally change the way that they represent women, and how this change will come about.  There are plenty of advertisement campaigns that go against negative representations of women in the media, such as the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, which aims to change the definition of beauty by represent women in the media with realistic body types as beautiful, real women.  As Jean Kilbourne said, the campaign isn't perfect, but it definitely seems like a step in the right direction for the way that women are represented in the media.  Thin models have definitely gotten a lot of negative attention, especially in images that are photos hopped, such as the Ralph Lauren photoshop scandal, in which a woman who is 5'10" and 120 pounds is made to look even smaller than she already is.  Below, the model is pictured on the left and the photo shopped image of her is pictured on the right.  As Kilbourne pointed out, her waist is smaller than the size of her head which is anatomically impossible.  It is images like these, that show women's bodies that they don't even have themselves in reality, that make girls and women feel like their body types aren't good enough and that they are not attractive because they cannot achieve the bodies that the models they see have. 

 

 

Women in Hollywood...Not pretty enough?

      I enjoyed Jean Kilbourne’s lecture but would agree that it was very similar to Killing Us Softly 4. However, there was one part of her talk that stood out to me. Kilbourne showed us the cover of Pretty Woman and stated that Julia Roberts had a “body double” in this film. Julia Robert’s head was photoshopped into a body for the cover and this mysterious body was also used for many scenes during the movie. As Michael Loprete states, “Behind every Pretty Woman stands a prettier woman.” This clip does a nice job of illustrating the role of a “body double” and interviews the mysterious lady with nice legs and a flat stomach..the lady who I thought was Roberts all along. 

     I would love to ask the producer of the movie what was wrong with using Julia Robert’s figure? I mean she is “pretty woman.” I would argue that the use of a body double creates an illusion and suggests that there is something wrong with the original image. Kilbourne refers to this as “psychic pressure” and said that these artificially constructed images support the fact that 91% of cosmetic surgeries are for women. I would also be interested in doing different types of analysis on this movie. How many times was the body double used in Pretty Woman? Has the use of body doubles increased or decreased and what might this suggest about women in Hollywood...not pretty enough?