Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly Series

“Women’s magazines are a central part of the multibillion-dollar industries that produce cosmetics and fashion and help shape the social construction of ‘beauty.’ Alongside these advertising campaigns are bodily standards against which women are encouraged to measure themselves. Because almost no one measures up to these artificially created and often computer-generated standards, the message is to buy these products and your life will improve” (Shaw, S. M., & Lee, J.).

    Jean Kilbourne is an American public speaker, writer, filmmaker, and activist, recognized for her work on the advertising of women and her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco. Kilbourne began her work in the late 1960s and has since been recognized by The New York Magazine as one of the top speakers on college campuses as she continues to study the links between advertising and public health issues such as violence, eating disorders, and addiction. She first began her series, Killing Us Softly, in 1979, which led to the creation of three more documentaries with Killing Us Softly 4, premiering in 2010 (Jean Kilbourne- Pioneering, Activist, Speaker, & Writer.). I first came across her series during a sociology course I took at Miami Dade College, roughly around 2020. Now as I take Women and Gender’s Studies, I come across her documentary once more and am reminded of the cruel world of advertising and media.

    As a child, I grew up witnessing my mom and older sister putting on makeup almost every day. There wasn’t a day where I didn’t see an advertisement of a model or actress talking about beauty products to keep women looking younger or look more beautiful. The same went with magazine covers of Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Brittney Spears, with headlines such as “Have a bikini body in just two weeks.” The older I got, the more I realized all these advertisements were showing that women needed to always have makeup, look young, have no grays, no wrinkles, be thin, and so forth. It’s not to say all magazines and advertising have done this but it’s happened so much so that now we are starting to see some shift in media but there is still quite a lot that needs to be done to change the way media has affected the minds of young girls and boys.

    I now have four nieces and I can’t say I’m not worried about their future, their self-confidence, and what they're going to pick up from everything they see, read, and hear. As Kilbourne shows her audience, there is not one model or actress that is not photoshopped in one way or another before they are put on the cover of magazines. It shows how a woman, even the most beautiful models in the world, are still edited because they are not good enough. The edits may seem minor but then there are edits such as the model of a Ralph Lauren magazine that made her waist so small that she looks unrecognizable. This is just one of the images that Kilbourne shows her audience on how advertising shows women what they need to do in order to reach these impossible standards of flawlessness.

Aside from the magazines and advertisements trying to make women feel self-conscious about how they look and them trying to achieve the beauty standards in magazines, there are many other troubling factors. There’s the fact that when women of color appear, they're typically shown to be beautiful if they have light skinned, have straight hair, and Caucasian features and can often be seen in jungle settings with exotic animals. There’s the fact that young girls exposed to sexualized images from a young age are prone to depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem. There’s the fact that men judge real women more harshly when they don’t appear as the supermodels in the magazines. There’s the sad fact that as some women’s bodies are transformed into objects, it dehumanizes them and the fact that some ads go as far as romanticizing violence (Kilbourne, J.). 

    There is quite a lot of work to be done in order to change how advertisements are being sent out and how the media handles it. Changes are already being made around the world such as the editor of British Vogue taking a stand and accusing designers of pushing thinner models into fashion magazines despite concerns on eating disorders. Germany's most popular women's magazine, Brigitta, announced that they'll use real life women for their covers. The European Union has proposed a series of measures, encouraging diverse and healthy body sizes in all models, and teaching media literacy in the schools (Kilbourne, J.). These are perhaps measures that America could do to help the young boys and girls understand that beauty comes in all different shapes, colors, and sizes, and that we do not have to strive to reach these impossible goals of flawlessness as everyone is unique and special just by being themselves.

 Work Cited

About Jean. Jean Kilbourne- Pioneering, Activist, Speaker, & Writer . (n.d.). Retrieved March 24, 

    2022, from https://jeankilbourne.com/about/

Kilbourne, J. (2010). Killing Us Softly- Advertising's Image of Women. Kanopy. Retrieved March 

    23, 2022, from https://ucf.kanopy.com/video/killing-us-softly

Shaw, S. M., & Lee, J. (2020). Chapter 5 Media and Culture . In Gendered Voices, Feminist 

    Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings (7th ed., pp. 222–279). essay, Oxford University 

    Press.