Lesson 8 "Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt."

I disagree with the title "Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt.". Both violence and advertising, and the physical and mental, are are the same form of hurt towards women and men alike. The mental, influenced by advertising results in the physical violence which creates a sad reality for culture as a whole. A refuter of the mental becoming physical need only to observe the effectiveness of advertising in its influence on behavior and ideas of behavior in culture. The depiction that particularly stood out to me in relation to this paper was on page 425 from Jean Kilbourne’s essay “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt.” It is part of the anthology, Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing.

  I chose this image because much of the online discussion in response to Kilbourne's interpretations of sexism and objectification in advertisements were skeptical as to wether or not her reading between the lines is a little fanciful with a panty bunch on top. This image captivates both interpretations of sex and sexism. Kilbourne makes a differentiation in theory between sex and sexism with the element of the glorification of violence justified by depicting women as objects. In this picture I would think that the situation in itself is sexual and not sexist. However, this depends upon whether or not the woman in this picture is distressed or not, as trying to determine whether or not she is depicted as an object is as fuzzy as defining an individual in culture. Advertising is the source of definitions for the individual in culture. 

This picture encourages hyper sexuality triggered by products (objects) in a over dramatized and impersonal (objectified) way. The accompanying title for the advertisement pushes it over the edge from typical stereotyping to worrisome. The title is "Wear it out and make it scream." nice word choice for closely binding together the ideas of sexuality and violence on many levels. Wow. After reading the title, the previously fence riding neutral scene of a black and white picture with a woman sporting a very interpretable face (pleasure or pain?) and three indifferent men one grabbing her hair, another caressing her, and another just hanging out paying no mind in the setting of a classic chain fence backdrop with red paint splattered and smeared over the picture, becomes a little more disconcerting in its violence/sexuality combination message.  

Because I initially would have thought of this advertisement as nothing more than sexual, I have been personally shown the effect that advertising has had on my ideas of sex and roles of the sexes. I believe that the dangerous aspect of advertising in this way is how impersonal the ideal is made out to be. This method of dehumanizing an entire population is seen in teaching soldiers to kill, and in the statistics of violence against women in the modern world, coupled with the amount of money spent on advertising (the art of manipulation of the masses). Media de-humanizes men as well as women, as the Squirrel Nut Zippers say "All the boys are monsters and all the girls are who**s.". Perhaps if media's purpose was not to make money, it could be used in creating a more healthful and artistic psychological ideal that deserves the title of culture.