In the article “Two ways a woman can get hurt” : Advertising and violence,
Jean Kilbourne explains how advertisement affects our society and our own
personal views on how we view others. She notes that advertisements have become
much like porn in where the emotion of being with a person is no longer genuine
and are more about a man dominating a woman for his own pleasure. Kilbourne states
that by having these sexual and often violent ads make our society more violent
and makes it harder for women and girls to be respected in the world.
The purpose of this reading is
to examine how ads do affect our social gender roles. As Kilbourne notes that
children are especially affected by adds stating that children tend to suffer sexual
ridicule. “It is probably difficult for those of us who are older to understand
how devastating and cruel and pervasive this harassment is, how different from
the “teasing” some of us might remember from our own childhoods. A 1993 report
by the American Association of University Women found that 56% of male students
said they had been sexually harassed in school.” According to this study a girl
was quoted saying “the boys called me slut, bitch. They called me ten timers,
because they say I go with ten guys at the same time. I put up with it because
I have no choice. The teachers say it’s because the boys think I’m pretty. “
Here it’s clearly shown that not only are young children being sexually
harassed but when they are often nothing is done about it.
My response to Kilbourne is I
feel like her article is out dated. Yes women are still placed in ads in sexual
manors and yes many of the ads are aimed at male dominance. There are many
things that our society still need to work on and gender inequality is one of
them. But in ten years, which is when I guess her article was written I fell
that things have changed somehow. It is no longer acceptable for politicians to
make a sexist remark even my accident. Just the other day Governor Romney made
the mistake of saying that even though his intention to employ women in fields of
power he had have people give him “a binder full of women.” This insulted many
women, myself included and if one looks as the news outlets there seems to be a
lot of talk of how Romney may have lost the women’s vote just for saying
something. I see this as an act of power for women. Politian’s now fear us and
while there still are those who want to limit women’s rights they can no longer
go our and do so in a carless manner.
On the issue of bullying, the
act of bullying is terrible and horrible acts of children tormenting children,
even adults tormenting each other still goes on. But there seems to be a greater
awareness of bullying and how destructive it can be for all parties. And I
would never suggest that bullying is not as destructive as it once was,
bullying is awful now and was awful then but I sense that is less tolerance for
bullying then there once was. Now if a child is caught bullying another and a
school does nothing there a chance that the school can be punished by either
being sued or having administration fired. I also feel there are more resources
available to help bullied kids.
The world is far from perfect
but there have been small bits of progress here and there. So what once was
true of ads isn’t necessarily completely true now. That’s not to say that all offence ads are
gone and ads have become less sexual, but what I see is less tolerance for something
offensive and what once helped sell a product would today destroy a company.
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