Media Meditation #1. Whore Models...The New Role Models?

Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly really stirred me while watching. I always felt that advertisements gave women a false sense of what is beautiful, but I never realized the other messages ads convey. Jean brought up some good points that are valid and present throughout most advertisements. The advertisements themselves don’t bother me much or affect me, but thinking about how a little girl growing up sees these ads all throughout her adolescences is really sad. I know you can’t entirely blame things like eating disorders on these ads, but they definitely contribute to their growing numbers. I believe that these advertisements are making girls shallower about looks, and also sluttier. Whenever I see girls, it seems that the younger they get the more they reveal in clothes and makeup. They wear things that I couldn’t imagine my mother even letting me out of the house in. Aside from this, I think it’s really sad that these types of ads is what girls have to look up to, clearly they will grow up with self-esteem issues.

 

One video I have seen many times that I believe is helping revolutionize the need to be perfect is by Dove.

 

 

This video does a great job showing how fake advertisements are.  The amount of retouching and reconfiguring the must be done to this model in order to get a perfect picture is ridiculous and completely unrealistic. How can young girls be expected to look up to people like this, who really don’t even exist? 

These advertisements use beautiful people and big lie to persuade their audience. Using sickly thin models and “creating” models with a computer is beautiful people in these ads. Young girls look up to these women and see an unrealistic image. Value messages are used in these advertisements also. Some value messages being taught to young girls is dressing like a slut and being stick skinny is good. These messages are wrong and should not be in places that young girls see every day, these are their idols and it is wrong. 

“Ads have stereotyped women as brainless or helpless of offered them as a reward for drinking a particular beer, wearing cool jeans, or smoking the right cigarette. Worst of all women, or even parts of women-with there heads cut from the frame-have been used as objects, merely associated with a certain product.” (Media & Culture, page 362) Advertising stereotypes women in a way that is degrading and objectifying. Although this does sell products, I think it is wrong to portray a human like this. The young girls looking at these ads are lowering their standards and self-esteem every day without realizing it.  I found a video on YouTube that supports my argument. “Reel Grrls is a youth produced video documenting an annual project entitled “the Wall of Shame”, which challenges teenage girls to talk back to the mainstream advertisers and their demeaning images of women.”

 

 

I think that this group is a great idea. It allows girls to see how wrong these advertisements are, and they are unaffected by their lies. I think this is a great group and their video portrays exactly what girls these days should be doing instead of looking up to these derogatory advertisements. 

Advertisements these days portray women in a negative light. This is harmful because young girls all over the world see this ads everyday, and it affects them in a way that is irreversible. Once their self-esteem and values are degraded, it is hard to gain back the self-esteem they need to grow into young respectful women. Hopefully in the future things will change and girls will have role models that are admirable and respectful.