![]() Girls tend to feel fine about themselves when they're eight, nine, ten years old, but they hit adolescence, and they hit a wall, and certainly part of this wall is this terrible emphasis on physical perfection. ![]() And they also get the message that they're going to fail, that there's no way to really achieve it. Everywhere we look, women's bodies turned into things and often just parts of things.Īnd girls are getting the message these days so young, that they need to be impossibly beautiful, hot, sexy, extremely thin. Just one part of the body is focused upon, which of course is the most dehumanizing thing you could do to someone. Women's bodies are dismembered in ads, hacked apart. And that step is already and constantly taken with women. The person is dehumanized, and violence then becomes inevitable. But turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person. I'm not at all saying that an ad like this directly causes violence. It creates a climate in which there's widespread violence against women. It also does something even more insidious. Now of course this affects female self-esteem. And this is everywhere, in all kinds of advertising, women's bodies turned into things, into objects. In this ad, she becomes part of a video game. Here she's become the bottle of Michelob. We all grow up in a culture in which women's bodies are constantly turned into things, into objects. You almost never see a photograph of a woman considered beautiful that hasn't been Photoshopped. ![]() Kelly Clarkson, well this is an says, "Slim down your way," but she in fact slimmed down the Photoshop way. She couldn't, because this is a look that's been created for years through airbrushing and cosmetics, but these days it's done through the magic of computer retouching. The supermodel Cindy Crawford once said, "I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford." She doesn't. Indeed, she has no pores.Īnd the most important aspect of this flawlessness is that it cannot be achieved. ![]() And failure is inevitable, because the ideal is based on absolute flawlessness. Women learn from a very early age that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and above all money, striving to achieve this look and feeling ashamed and guilty when we fail. So the first thing the advertisers do is surround us with the image of ideal female beauty. Well what does advertising tell us about women? It tells us, as it always has, that what's most important is how we look. To a great extent, they tell us who we are and who we should be. They sell concepts of love and sexuality, of success and perhaps most important, of normalcy. Have things gotten any better?" And actually I have to say, really they've gotten worse. Sometimes people say to me, "You've been talking about this for 40 years. ![]()
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