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The
woman at the podium is smiling, her voice a little breathless,
as if she were just a tad nervous about her reception.
The image projected behind her, a larger-than-life Revlon
ad, is of a woman who is neither breathless nor smiling,
but instead presents a lacquered, doll-like blankness."We
are surrounded by such images of ideal beauty," says
Jean Kilbourne, reminding the audience—as she has
in more than a thousand college lecture halls around
the country—that we are all being judged against
this porcelain perfection. And that when we are compared
to such a standard, "failure is inevitable."
We
all eventually "have the bad taste, the poor judgment,
to grow older," she says in a low and friendly voice
that gains confidence the longer she talks. Kilbourne
pauses as her audience murmurs with the familiar laughter
of recognition. The connection has been made. They see
what she sees: how the ideal is unattainable, and more
importantly, how it is being used against us.
For
Kilbourne, that message has become a mission. As one
of the preeminent scholars on the effects of advertising,
Kilbourne has shown, through lectures, films, and a
book, how marketing has perfected the science of seducing
us. How its glossy allure can leave us feeling somewhat
less than human. In the ideal presented by advertising,
"our face becomes a mask," she says to the assembled
students, as she clicks through slides of cosmetics
ads, all featuring flawless faces. "And our body becomes
a thing." Listening to her speak, one could almost think
that Kilbourne is discovering these truths for the first
time. Her indignation seems so fresh and immediate that
you'd never imagine she's been lecturing with unflagging
passion on this topic for more than 20 years. Her voice
is calm, even a little sad now that she's flashing picture
after picture of women with impossibly smooth, overwhelmingly
Caucasian features onto the screen. "And turning a human
being into a thing," she continues, "is often the first
step toward justifying violence." The next series of
ads begins by showing women as props, intended to make
cars or apartments more attractive; it then shifts to
tight shots of butts and thighs, and finally mere parts.
Dismembered limbs. Meat.
Later,
sitting in the kitchen of the Victorian house she shares
with her 13-year-old daughter near Boston, Kilbourne
is still eager to talk about her ideas. Yes, she lives
this stuff. Yes, she says, there are many ads that we
all recognize as sexist, the silly ones that use our
bodies to advertise beer or boats, or her own personal
bête noire, cigarettes. And many of us are also
aware of the subliminal messages of the cosmetics industry:
that we must, in the words of William Butler Yeats,
"labour to be beautiful," even if that means sacrificing
our health to fad diets and our money to the producers
of paints and powders. Although women today are as media
savvy as we've ever been, we are exposed to something
like three thousand ads each day, she estimates. And
so, despite our intelligence and despite our growing
cynicism, the message—that we are not good enough
as we are and need certain products&3151;seeps through.
Add the fact that the advertising industry has gotten
smarter since Kilbourne began lecturing full-time in
1977, and it's easy to see the problem. We're inundated
with products to buy—and the notion that we haven't
really experienced our lives unless we've bought something—whether
it's a soda to watch the sunset with or a soap to make
a day at work more "invigorating." CONTINUE>>
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