Reading Response 4: Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt
Jean Kilbourne’s thesis is that the objectifying influence of advertising is destructive to women’s self-image. She is entirely right, and the problem is in some ways worse than she describes. Unfortunately, she writes with a clear bias that rises alongside the passion with which she approaches the subject. By the end, I had become so lost in exploring the unnecessary subjectivity that I’d completely disconnected myself from her actual argument (made within the first few pages anyway). My greater interest was in the many ways the author was encouraging me to grow weary of the message for want of a better messenger.
On my reading, the first hint that stood out was Kilbourne’s observation that “pornography can be considered mainstream.” (489) This assessment follows a list of circumstances that are either not pornographic, or not mainstream. The leap she makes is a call to read carefully, and the first infractions appear innocuous enough. There is a hint of some unfamiliarity with her material – or else a deliberate mischaracterization? – in her observation that pop culture “mocks men who have real intimacy with women,” (491) based on the abrasive behavior of married men in ads. While I would not disagree with her conclusion, she backs it up with the wrong evidence. Such ads don’t convey married men as jerks so that we can mock them for the intimacy of the relationship they have with their wives, they do it to denigrate the intimacy itself as a corrupting influence.
Other instances (of which there are several) appear to suggest wishful thinking, of choosing to characterize otherwise ambiguous situations in a particular way. Certainly one can wonder if the woman in the Old Spice ad (493) is laughing or screaming, if one has no familiarity with human expression. A wolf appears among sheep on behalf of Smirnoff, and “we all know what wolves do to sheep.” (494) Well, they don’t rape them, as her paragraph had set up to argue. In the same paragraph night people are criticized for their destructive nihilism, because their not following the “rules of the day” is taken to mean they must follow no decent rules at all.
Some arguments made simply have no place, or are connected poorly. The discussion of provocatively weird things going on in Japan (505) is a non-sequitur, completely absent context or any relevance to the American culture she explores. As she approaches her conclusion, she discusses the growing level of violence being done to women, both literally and spiritually. As presented, these unfortunate circumstances are in no way representative of her argument. What makes them so unfortunate here is that they very much should be. While she connects the sexually possessive behavior of men to the advertising that promotes such imagery (508), she never does so explicitly in the pages of destruction she describes. To be fair, this omission may be a cropping issue in excerpting it from a larger work. To be practical, framing such violence as tangential is either bad editing or bad writing.
Perhaps most harmful to her argument is when she becomes a part of the very problem she opposes. In one sense she does this with every occasion of erring on the side of sex, but the ambiguity of her source material secures the less-problematic charge of Kilbourne simply having a dirty mind. In discussing the growing sexualization of young girls however, she goes far, far astray. The 1996 murder of first-grade beauty “queen” JonBenet Ramsey (505) is an excellent example that inspired a national conversation on deviance towards girls. She precedes that anecdote however with an example of exactly what not to do. Pictured on the previous page is a young girl from what appears to be a part of a fashion layout. She is pretty little girl, wearing a dress covered with little cherries, and the image is captioned “very cherry!” To the author, this is “a sexy little African American girl,” posed seductively and captioned with suggestive language. Context here is crucial. As a fashion image, there is a strong possibility that its printing was in something closer to Parenting than Penthouse. In the unlikely latter, Kilbourne would indeed have a fair point. In the far-more-likely former, she is engaging in the very tactics employed by the advertisers she deplores- taking an otherwise “innocent” subject and turning it into something perverse.
The inclusion of this element was one poor choice among many, and the competition for inclusion here was fierce. (The young woman from the MTV ad is as upset with me as she is of the label Kilbourne completely misconstrues.) It is to the author’s benefit that her thesis stands so well on its own that it doesn’t need to be supported by her own credibility; she spends 24 pages here giving it away.
English 1C #73767
05 October 2017
Originally posted the wrong essay under this title…