Advertising & Women

What are your thoughts?




Here are mine:


I get that ads affect our thinking, at least I get intellectually.  But I can't swallow all the points in Killing Us Softly. I just want to argue with the woman.

    One of her main points is that ads tell women that we must be flawless.  That to have worth, we must look like the perfect female form.  Kilbourne theorizes that this objectifies women because the ads actually turn women into objects.  And that those ads, transfer into how we think of ourselves and how others/men think of us. It creates low self-esteem and creates a “climate in which there is wide spread violence against women”.  Turning a human being into an object is the first step in violence.  

   But didn't we have violence against women far far far before we had print ads?  Didn't Constantine the Great burn his wife alive when she served no use to him? How can we say that advertising causes women to be objectified?  I just don't get it.  Its like the chicken before the egg argument. Did the media objectify women and has that caused violence against women?  Or the the objectification of women create the current climate of advertising?