Killing Us Softly Part 2

            One of the strangest aspects about the issues brought up in Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly 4 is one of awareness. After all, se says “that things aren’t getting better and that they’re getting worse”. This is her fourth movie on the subject and she claims that she still needs to educate the world on the dangers of the beauty myth in advertising.

            What surprises me about this is that nothing about the advertising industry is a secret. Men and women alike know that the Photoshop is used widespread across the world for digital imaging, but people still try and attain the impossible standard of beauty that they see in advertisements. Is it our fault that the beauty myth is still around? I don’t think we should blame ourselves. I think that certain advertisements, standards, and images have been implanted into our minds from a young age and we’ve just become more and more accustomed to them. We would all consider ourselves ‘used to’ the sexual imagery presented to us daily, but if the ads shown to us were taken to another country, for example Saudia Arabia or Iran, we’d get a completely different reaction. They’re used to women covering themselves to show humility and we’re used to almost the exact opposite. So what is it that makes this beauty myth seem so permanent?

            In my humble opinion, it’s the youth being exposed to this kind of imagery that makes it seem like it’s a permanent fixture in our culture. It’s those that don’t take in advertisements within the right context. A lack of education is what makes these ads so dangerous. If one truly thinks that a model is what every woman should aspire to look like but isn’t educated about the use of photoshop, or genetic differences in body type, then they will become self-conscious about the way that they look.

            There’s no other way to put it. Since we can’t exactly change the way people market their products, we have to change the way that we view them, and not just from an adult point of view, but also from as young as we can start educating ourselves about it. Jean Kilbourne describes this type of education as “Media Literacy” in her presentation and she even says that they’ve got a few classes running, but what we need is more than a few classes, we need to make it common knowledge.