Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence in an Urban Context

Kilbourne’s argument provides a lot of insight to the messages being portrayed in the media and advertisement. In our world today these messages are most often over looked because of their subliminal nature. Other times we just don’t pay attention to them and how they can affect younger generations, especially the ones who are close to us. As we all now sex sells in the media and of course businesses will exploit that as much as possible, even to the point where it gets a little outrageous. An example of this would be the ad that used women’s breasts to sell fishing lines. Her argument had some exaggerations but overall it showed a lot of the possible ways that the media and advertisement can be destructive to women and children, and I agree with her because I believe that it has already taken an affect. One can only imagine what will happen in the future.

Kilbourne’s argument relates to ideas about gender and gender identity development because she highlighted what the advertisements were saying and how they can shape the way women think. One of the things she spoke about was people with eating disorders, who clearly won’t benefit from the messages that the ads are sending. Things that we see in the world create impressions on us affecting how we think and a lot of times who we are. When you think about it that is pretty much the purpose of the media and advertising. This causes a lot of potential problems with people’s identity as ads become more and more gender specific. Every so often society has a lot of noticeable trends that are obviously credited by things we observe. People might see these trends as normal waves  but when you portray that lighter is beautiful, skinnier is sexy, or masculinity/aggressiveness is the way to go, you turn harmful trends into movements that develop into future identities. The identities which often leads to self esteem issues.

I can see her argument highlighting issues with children and personality formation. It is fair to say that the younger you are the more impressionable you are, especially when it comes to developing your personality and identity. Children are one of the media’s biggest audiences so they are definitely being exposed to a lot of sensitive messages. Even worse is the fact that they most likely will take them out of context or may not have to mental capacity to understand what the media is trying to do. Having young girls believe that the only way to be strong women is to be more masculine can really throw off what it really means to be a woman period. Basically the main problem comes from a standardized idea of what seems to be the right way to live.