The Monster Media Creates

No matter a person’s race, gender, or socioeconomic status, avoiding media in the 21st century is almost entirely impossible. Television shows, films, commercials, advertisements and music videos are only a few examples of channels through which viewers are bombarded with messages that enforce stereotypes, encourage prejudice, or associate stigmas with certain aspects of the human identity. This is problematic on both the internal and external level–– while messages in the media oftentimes cause consumers to compare themselves to unrealistic standards, they also ultimately influence viewers to devalue not only themselves but human life as a whole.

Unfortunately, evidence for this point can be found easily in both old and new ads that objectifies women in order to sell a product or service. For example, this Battleship board game ad portrays the father and son of a family playing Battleship at a table, while the mother and daughter fold laundry in the background. This not only assumes that a woman would be uninterested in a game concerning battleships, but it also places her in the homemaker role. The smiles on these characters indicate that the women should be content doing the housework, and the men should remain unconcerned that they are relaxing and enjoying Battleship, and their female counterparts are not.

A more recent example is this Jimmy Choo  fragrance ad that places great emphasis on the male, Kit Harrington, and almost none on the female.  Because the woman’s head is cut off, consumers have no way of identifying this person and automatically reduce her to a torso and a pair of legs. Furthermore, the manner in which Harrington holds the woman’s ankle seems proprietorial, implying she is something to be possessed. Just as Jean Kilbourne argues in Still Killing Us Softly, objectification leads to dehumanization, which ultimately leads to violence. While companies should avoid using women to sell products, the sexism demonstrated through these ads is not the greatest issue at hand. The problem is that consumers, including children, are being inundated with ads that deliver the same underlying message: women are not as valuable as men and can be treated as objects.

This dilemma is not by any means limited to women–– in fact, bell hooks describes women of all races and black people of all genders as “the poor and disenfranchised.” Of course, this by no means excludes other racial minorities, the LGBTQIA+ community, and so many other marginalized communities that exist and are oppressed everyday through the media. Not only do these groups have to endure seeing their people and culture misrepresented on large-scale distribution platforms such as television and film, but they also have to deal with everyday racism, sexism, and mistreatment from their peers. The repercussion of buying into the media can manifest itself in different ways, whether subtle such as an insensitive remark or obvious such as domestic violence. Members of society begin to create hierarchies in their minds, ranking others based on skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and the list goes on.

Kilbourne attributes this dangerous behavior and the success of companies that use controversial advertising to human addiction and emptiness. People crave fulfillment, and companies promise that their product or service will make consumers beautiful, successful, popular, and unique. These are all qualities that society has been conditioned to value and desire to an extremely high extent, even at the cost of devaluing human life. The solution Kilbourne presents, though much easier said than done, is nothing radical: society must embrace its responsibility to set the standard higher and prevent these toxic subliminal messages in the media. The value of life should never be forgotten or dismissed.

 

Works Cited

hooks, bell. Where We Stand: Class Matters. Routledge, 2009.

Kilbourne, Jean, and Mary Pipher. Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. Free Press, 2012.

Lazarus, Margaret and Renner Wunderlich, directors. Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. Cambridge Documentary Films, 1987.