KILLING THEM (WOMEN) SOFTLY

ABOUT THE FILM

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Killing Us Softly III offers a new generation of students and ordinary television viewers a chance to share Jean Kilbourne?s uniquely empowering critique of advertising?s image of women. One of America?s most persuasive media critics, her previous best-selling videos Killing Us Softly (1979) and Still Killing Us Softly (1987) have changed the lives of millions of women by helping them recognize the devastating impact of advertising on their self-image. Now, at the start of a new millennium, Killing Us Softly III summarizes twenty years of research and lecturing to alert women and men to the insidious new techniques advertisers use to get us, quite literally, to buy into gender stereotypes. 

Not surprisingly, Jean Kilbourne finds in ad after ad that the basic message hasn?t changed: the most important thing for any woman is her appearance. Advertisers still relentlessly intimidate, shame, and even flatter women into spending billions of dollars trying to change the way they look. One difference is they now set the standard of beauty so high that today?s woman must aim to be nothing short of perfect, ?flawless?. She is likely only to see models with a body type only 5% of women share, who have often been reshaped by death-defying diets and plastic surgery, to say nothing of computer enhancement and even biomorphing. 

Killing Us Softly III also shows how much advertising for women has become blatantly sexualized, simultaneous magnifying and trivializing the role of sex in women?s lives. The message of the ?sexual revolution?, Kilbourne ironically observes, seems to have been that women have the right to be sex objects. Kilbourne believes that ?advertisers are the real pornographers of our time.? Deliberately shocking ads reveal disturbing trends including the portrayal of children in sexually suggestive situations, the equation of sexuality with violence, and even the suggestions that women secretly want to be battered. Kilbourne acknowledges that men now are also routinely treated as sex objects in advertising but notes that men are unlikely to be judged professionally by their appearance, let alone harassed and beaten. 

Frequently humorous, never sanctimonious, Killing Us Softly III will convince anyone that the portrayal of gender in the media is serious business. As Jean Kilbourne says: ?Ads keep us trapped in rigid roles and crippling definitions?. We must change not just ads but the attitudes in our culture, which underlie them. What?s at stake is our ability to have authentic, freely chosen lives.?