I thought Kilbourne’s speech was very well thought out and supported by substantial evidence. At first I thought her claims were outrageous and speculative. For instance, she kept saying that women were portrayed as passive and in the background. I thought she was selecting advertisements that supported her claim and it took me a few seconds before her argument sunk in. As a woman, I am outraged by the portrayal of women sexually but I never noticed how they were also portrayed as passive, for some reason I couldn’t grasp that argument until supporting evidence was shown. In fact, some of the ads that she showed were so blatantly encouraging women’s passiveness to the extent that it literally had words to support the claim. I believe as I was watching Kilbourne’s argument years of media influence and brainwash were both surfacing and unraveling. She drives home the idea of how we should be conscious of advertisements and change them / our attitude toward them; otherwise we would not be able to live freely. I loved how her argument dug to the deeper issue of feelings which are polarized and set on two extremes: masculine and feminine; and how ultimately we have gender-ized our emotions so that the more “feminine” emotions such as sensitivity and compassion were not welcomed (because they are seen as weak). Her illustrative metaphors and likening media to mainstream pornography support how critical it is to pay attention to this issue.
According to the text, media refers to mass communication, whether it is newspapers, magazines, Internet. We are immersed in media. The text mentions how television, the most exposed form of media for children, communicates information and sways our opinion, it even moves us emotionally. Kilbourne also mentions about two to three full years of our lives equal the amount of advertisements an individual has seen, roughly 3000 a day. Therefore, contributing to the fact that we are engrained in what media portrays as our culture, and have come to terms with projecting those identities portrayed to men and women around us; holding the media standards as our own, or creating rigid gender schemas (ie: how a woman should look, how a man should feel and so forth).
This relates to the idea of gender concepts and identity because kids are so saturated by the media that they mimic what they see. Often times children act on what the gender descriptions imposed on them are rather than orienting it based on interest. For instance, in the video seen in class boys and girls had their own activities they were interested in, boys enjoyed more active and physical games where as girls had participate in games that were more to themselves. Yet, the boys at the boy’s school played a hand game that would typically be considered feminine if they were in a co-ed environment. This example shows how environments have a huge impact on the characteristics displayed by individuals, if people adhered to Kilbourne’s thesis (about changing how we perceive advertisements staying away from gender polarization) things would look different, men and women would be able to live more freely rather than boxing actions and emotions to two rigid concepts.
