Jean Kilbourne Analysis

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In today’s society, sex is romanticized. Walking down the streets in New York for 10 minutes can almost guarantee half naked women posing in some of the strangest positions desperately begging for attention. Advertisements have grown and evolved throughout the years and with each year comes sluttier and skinnier women. The dynamic of women in advertisements has changed drastically since the dawn of advertisement. The U.S.A. needs to change in order to make our society classier. Advertisements have become increasingly sexual and depict women and men as perfect which gives unrealistic standards to achieve.
Jean Kilbourne argues in her lecture that women are expected to be perfect in society. You see this a lot in modeling and in advertisements.
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They want to sell jeans. However, you obviously feel much different when you look at the two ads. Jean Kilbourne discusses how only 8% of the advertisement we see is a conscious reaction to the advertisement. The rest is analyzed in the back of our mind leading us to judge ourselves and tell us to buy the product. obviously a lot has changed over the last 30 years in advertisements. Our society has become more sexual and we rely much more on editing images. Jean Kilbourne talks about how insecure women are because of these advertisements. They are expected to be perfect because that is how the women on the magazine covers are. This creates mental health issues when these young teenagers view these photoshopped women and can not look exactly like them making themselves feel horrible. It is understandable why more young females have mental health issues like depression and anxiety than in the 1980s. In the 1980s ad, ( left) you see a fully clothed woman with her back arched in and posterior sticking out to expose her butt. she does not have a large waist or large breasts and her hair is far from perfect. She has a shirt on covering up her most likely non anorexic body. This sells the jeans without oversexualizing the prdouct. Sure the women is still bent over in a suggestive pose but, she at least is not in lingerie or