Sex in the Media

The author of the Killing Us Softly, Jean Killbourne, has been studying and analyzing women in the media for four decades now. To nobody's surprise, she is completely against how women are portrayed in the media. She feels that women have been objectified in advertisements since the dawn of the advertisement era. She has a very conservative narrow-minded view on sex and her feminist ideals seem to get in the way of a real subjective analysis of how women and sex are used in the media.

She says that men are objectified sexually similar to how women are but just not as often. She mentions that men in advertisements are looked as powerful and confident. She showed ads of women depicted as being abused by a man and she claims that contributes to violence against women. That is complete horseshit. Do you think some hick looks at a Gucci ad of a woman being slightly chocked and then suddenly has an urge to beat his wife? Violence upon women comes from the idea that they are the inferior sex, an idea that has comes from the days of the Bible. Why doesn't she discuss sexist themes in the Bible, pieces of paper that affect a lot more people lives than some magazine page that we glance over for 0.8 seconds.

She claims that the media has affected men's perceptions of women. She says that these ads make men look at women for just sexual purposes. My solution to the unfair depiction of women and men in advertisement is have men and women who do not wanted to be depicted in a way that Killbourne sees as "unfair" to not take those sort of modeling jobs. The fact is, models are not being forced into these advertisement shoots, so I would ask Killbourne: are these women really being depicted unfairly if they are choosing to be?