introduction
Jean Kilbourne, a feminist filmmaker, speaker, and author, has been studying the effects of advertising on women since 1960. Her most recent film, "Killing Us Softly 4", depicts her views regarding the representation of women in advertising. Kilbourne draws connections between the power of images in the media and current public health problems, such as eating disorders and violence. We first viewed Kilbourne's film in a Sociology class at Colorado University at Boulder, it sent a very strong message that made us view advertisements in a different way. The purpose of Kilbourne's film is to work towards creating an aware, active, and educated public regarding these issues. In her film, Kilbourne says that ads primarily sell products, but they also sell a view of sexuality and normalcy. She wants to not only change the ads, but also the attitudes that run deep in our society as a result of these advertisements. We support Kilbourne's purpose; however, our purpose with this website is to emphasize the importance of thinking critically about the films shown to students in classes. It is very easy to watch a film such as "Killing Us Softly 4" that projects such a strong message and a plethora of evidence and believe it without question or validity. We think it is very important for students to create their own opinions about such matters which is why we want to compare Kilbourne's findings with with advertisements that we found to see if her arguments still hold true.
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Kilbourne hand selected the images shown in her film in order to covey a very specific message about the concepts and themes she believes advertisements portray. The images in her film mainly portray graphic, womanizing, unrealistic, and degrading advertisements; thus, we wanted to see if the themes depicted in her film were as prevalent as the film would have you think. In order to examine this, we chose three different genres of magazines: People, an entertainment magazine, Vogue, a women's fashion magazine, and GQ, a men's fashion magazine, and compared them to the images used in "Killing Us Softly 4" to see if the images were an accurate portrayal of what is expressed in current advertising. In order to have a representative sample of images, we examined every third advertisement found in each of these magazines.