Advertisers or Pornographers?

Killing Us Softly 4, is a fourth and the latest American documentary in the series by Jean Kilbourne. First documentary was released in 1979, second one in 1987, third one in 2000 and the fourth one in 2010. With each movie, she takes a fresh look into the unrealistic and distorted ideals of beauty, perfection and sexuality that advertisers these days portray via ads. She talks about images of women in advertising, effects of these images on women's self-esteem, gender stereotyping, and objectification of women in ads.

Killing Us Softly 4 by 1989jkm

In this video, she shows us how the women, who appear to be slim, tall, flawless, wrinkle-free, pore-free, white looking and almost perfect are created using Photoshop by combining different parts of several models combined together to create one single image of a perfect model in an ad. The non-white women or the women of color are usually considered beautiful only if they approximate the white ideal. Light skinned, straight haired, Caucasian featured models are considered to be ideal in ads. And, as if that is not enough these women are shown partially or fully naked as if they were a sex object especially in ads which bear no relevance to them. Sometimes women are turned into a part of a video game, sometimes into a bottle of beer, and sometimes into a car among many such things. And, the worse part is that the way real men feel about the very real women they are with and how they end up comparing them with these unrealistic images of women they see in ads. All these images of women create violence against women. They lead to low self-esteem in women. Women feel more conscious about their body. They starve themselves to death to achieve a supermodel like figure.

Overall, though this video discusses women in American ads, but this video stands true for any given country in the world, for standards of beauty across the globe are more or less similar.

It is shameful, how despite efforts of women like her and several other people, things have barely changed. India is no less behind when it comes to stereotyping women. The only difference being women model in Indian ads are clad a little more than their American counterparts. The rest remains the same.

Do watch this eye-opening documentary and let us spread it in our circle and make people realize how the business of advertising has turned into a business of pornography among several other bad things.