By Ali Morris
Staff Writer

Last Wednesday, Jan. 28, over 150 people packed into the Olin Concert Hall to listen to Jean Kilbourne speak. An enemy of advertising agencies, Kilbourne is known for giving lectures all across the country about the negative effect of ads on their audiences and how they are responsible for eating disorders and low self-esteem issues. College-aged girls are especially targets, making it no coincidence that three-fourths of the audience were women.
You might ask why Kilbourne became interested in lecturing people on this issue. As a former model, Jean Kilbourne was unhappy with the way people were presented in the industry. With new computer techniques, magazines can change anything from the color of the model’s eyes to the shape of his or her entire leg. In fact, most ads use features of four to five different people to assemble the one person you see in the picture, making it virtually impossible to look the way the ad presents the person. Sometimes magazines even superimpost a man’s leg on a woman’s body because men often have longer and leaner leg figures.

So if ads are one big lie, how is that supposed to make the public feel? An average model weighs 23% less than the average woman. If they are supposed to target a consumer for their product, then the consumer will want to appear the way the model appears. This leads to huge health risks and often depression, because the average person can never come close to appearing that way. Therefore, the occurence of eating disorders has greatly increased. One in five girls has an eating disorder (as in bulimia or anorexia), and four in five girls have admitted to thinking about their weight on a regular basis. These statistics show that practically every girl has become a victim to weight issues in some way or another.

Not only do models’ body types send messages to their audience, but their actions do as well. Many food ads present a dangerously skinny model eating the product in an erotic manner and, in doing so, present a double standard to their consumer. Instead of promoting an unhealthy proportion of food in a way that doesn’t seem as though the person will gain weight, ads need to show how we “must learn to eat with pleasure and joy, in a healthy setting” says Kilbourne. Not surprisingly, many ads also have sexual messages. “The impact of sexual messages is actually anti-erotic. They are used to desensitize us instead of shock us,” stated Kilbourne. Also, in ads that portray a man and a woman, “the woman is always shown as smaller than the man and in a position of less power.” The opposite is true when race is involved. If a man of color is portrayed with a white woman, the woman will often seem more powerful and the man more subordinate. The subliminal messages that these advertisements send to the public cross many unnecessary boundaries that should not, in any way, be promoted in our society.

Because ads place such a strong emphasis on sexuality, Kilbourne remarked, “if someone were to come from a different planet, they would conclude two things: first, that sex is the most important thing in our world, and second, that sex is only for the young.” The ads don’t address relationships or intimacy in the least bit, which encourages young audiences to look at sex trivially. From eating disorders to self esteem issues, ads in our society have placed a false impression of perfection.



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