Killing Us Softly

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Program Board's screening and discussion of Jean Kilbourn's fourth film in the documentary series "Killing Us Softly: Advertizers' Images of Women." The original Killing Us Softly aired in 1979 and in Killing Us Softly 4, Jean Kilborne describes how even after 30 years of social activism-- which entails the birth of media studies and the women's movement--even after the discovery of sociological evidence linking violence against women, epidemic eating disorders, and the ever increasing number of plastic surgeries performed in the United States in the last ten years (it's an over 100% increase) the media's relationship with women, while in some ways improved, is still in dire need of help.
Like Katy's post detailed, the argument of Kilbourne's documentary is laid out in her pictures. Ads frequently turn women's bodies into passive objects, trivializing their personalities and desires, as well as those of men. However, unlike men, women are almost universally put into positions of vulnerability-- childlike poses, sexualized poses-- while men most often remain dominant, stable, and aloof. Their bodies are more often cut up. Like a pair of legs in a print ad to sell Budweiser. Or breasts for a videogame. I've noticed this "cutting up" thing at lot-- even in the editing of equally progressive documentaries, like MissRepresentation. The segment of the film talking about domestic violence I remember had image after image of half of a face, or a body with no head, bruised and disfigured. Now, maybe in doing that, the editors of MR are trying to make a progressive point in an edgy way, that the abuse itself objectified and dehumanized those women, but I remember feeling uneasy about that segment without being able to put my finger on why. Does more dismemberment make that condition better?
Finally, Killing Us Softly 4 isn't making an argument that advertising itself is bad or that capitalism and commercialism are bad, or inherently sexist. Kilbourne is making a much simpler argument: that these images don't exist in a vacuum. They effect everyone.It also isn't about saying "this is what men do to women" because obviously, women are doing this to women too. And women are doing it to themselves.