Taking Advertising Seriously
by Fiona Morgan
Free Press Contributor
In classrooms and lecture halls since the 1970s, students of mass media and women's studies have viewed Jean Kilbourne's award-winning documentary Still Killing Us Softly, in which she deconstructs images of women in advertising and the cultural values they convey.
Densely informative and amusing, Kilbourne's lecture is still one of a kind. Her presentation is a vastly needed dose of media literacy, a crash-course in critical thinking about the most conspicuous vehicle of communication in our society: advertising.
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What do women want?
"...Just a cigar." - S. Freud
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Early in November, Kilbourne brought her slide presentation, and her nine-year-old daughter, to the University of Washington's Kane Hall. She was met by a crowd of approximately 900 students and faculty.
Kilbourne's lecture hasn't changed dramatically during 20 years of touring college campuses and doing research for the National Institute of Health. She still begins with the basics, making it clear that "Advertising is the foundation of the mass media. The primary purpose of the mass media is to deliver audiences to advertisers."
Over the past 20 years, Kilbourne told me, "The advertising has gotten worse. There's more of it, it's more sophisticated, it's more blatant in some ways, and advertising is more and more taking over our media and our society."
One example she cited was the increase in bus advertising, and a specific bus in her hometown of Boston which had been converted into a box of Dunkin' Donuts. As we all can see, Seattle transit has also accommodated companies like Ikea.
"But at the same time," she added, "there's also an increasing consciousness about advertising. So that in the beginning, I had to spend a lot of time convincing people that advertising mattered, and I don't have to do that so much anymore. People are much more aware. They are more media literate."
She said that increased consciousness has come in part from the public health arena, citing the debate over tobacco advertising which made its way into the presidential election. "There's been tremendous progress in terms of identifying tobacco advertising as part of the problem.
"As people begin to see and understand the power that [tobacco ads] have, they can also see how we're influenced in other ways as well."
One of Kilbourne's major topics is sexuality - the dominance of heterosexuality, the way it's manipulated to sell products, and the way sex and beauty are equated with violence in ads for everything from shoes, to jeans, to food.
One of Kilbourne's old standbys is an ad of a pretty young woman, which says, "Whatever you're giving him tonight, he'll enjoy it better with rice."
"I may be naive," Kilbourne exclaims, "but I still haven't figured out what the hell you're supposed to do with rice!"
Kilbourne commented on the highly exaggerated representation of women, men and children in ads. She shows the semiotics of height, race, and costume on even small children. The larger cultural effect is that "certain qualities we all need are divided and polarized, labeled feminine and masculine. Women devalue themselves and each other, and men devalue traits they consider to be feminine, or weak ... Women are reduced to objects, and men learn to associate their sexuality with brutality."
One of the most radical things about Jean Kilbourne's lecture is her refusal to be puritanical. She is hardly anti-sex, anti-men, or pro-censorship. Even to the crowd who gasped at the image of a woman in a body bag on a department store floor, a shoe on her neck (it was an ad for shoes), Kilbourne emphasized the need for "more free speech" to combat the problem of violent imagery.
More free speech, she said, "could mean people taking back control of the airwaves. The public owns the airwaves, you know, but most people don't realize that. So one thing we need is to have more direct public access to [media] so that we can get different kinds of information."
Kilbourne believes in "more discussion, more debate, dialogue, leaflets, boycotting..." as a necessary aspect of democracy. The discussion after her lecture provided a forum for people to talk about Channel One, the television service making its way into Washington public schools. Channel One provides audio-visual equipment and "educational" programming in exchange for a captive commercial audience.
She distributed a contact sheet titled "Resources for Change," featuring organizations and reading lists in areas from gender equality to public health, and from media advocacy to corporate power. Kilbourne embraces the many aspects of social problem-solving necessary to counteract advertising's influence.
One of Kilbourne's biggest labors is the deconstruction of tobacco and alcohol advertising and the way their messages contribute to addiction. She has created several slide presentations, such as "You've Come the Wrong Way Baby: Women and Smoking," which analyze the way ads for Virginia Slims and similar products directly target young women and girls who are obsessive about their weight. She said in Still Killing Us Softly that the Virginia Slims campaign, with its pictures of thin, free, fun-loving independent women, was "brilliant," since it effectively associated addiction with independence.
"That's one of the things that happens in capitalism," she said, "is that rebellion is constantly co-opted, so that the women's movement became, 'You've got your own cigarette.' But of course, all that really does is enslave you for life. And yet, it runs very deep in the culture, this co-optation of rebellion."
Breathing down the neck of the ad world, Kilbourne believes that images in advertising ought to become less racist, less exploitative of women, and less trivializing of human needs. However, she is quick to realize that a few positive images are not a sure sign of progress.
"It certainly is a good idea to have more people of color and I've noticed more disabled people in ads, and that's good. But some of what passes for 'progressive advertising' is really just more sophisticated targeting. They're just trying to reach an audience that believes itself not influenced by advertising. So they reach that very audience and say 'we know you're not influenced by this ad,' and then they sell to them."
Kilbourne encouraged the crowd to look at more than just the images in ads when considering the companies they represent. She cited the positive image of a woman in a Nike ad - independent, athletic, without makeup. Yet the company relies on the labor of poor people in Third World countries - many of them women.
Kilbourne said she envisions an ideal communication system which serves democracy by treating its audience like citizens, rather than consumers. Such a system would have more cable stations and magazines, reflecting "a wide variety of interests." Every city would have several papers, from several points of view. As it stands now, local coverage is largely neglected in the current news media offerings.
"What passes for news is all the same from coast to coast. I read these newspapers in my travels and they're dreadful for the most part, dreadful!
"Most people are incredibly ill-informed about their local politics, and that's incredibly important.
"I was watching on the news last night that the Seattle school board did decide to let advertising into the schools and I was thinking, you know, who votes for these people on the school board? How many people saw this as an important issue and contacted their school board officials? How many people were really informed about this issue? Probably not many, because there isn't real coverage of these kinds of issues.
"Everybody knows every detail about O.J., and they know every detail about some murder that happened in the middle of the country, but they don't know who their school board officials are, or what the burning issues are in their own community. And that's because these newspapers are market-driven and they're owned by a few chains, which have no interest in local politics. They just are interested in selling lots of newspapers."
For information about Jean Kilbourne's lectures, contact:
Lordly & Dame
51 Church Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02116
(617) 482-3593
For information on her films and videos, contact:
Cambridge Documentary Films at (617) 354-3677.
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Contents on this page were published in the January/February, 1997 edition of the Washington Free
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