Baby, I Was Born This Way

Jean Kilbourne’s documentary, Killing Us Softly 4, lays out the societal consequences that result from the advertising and beauty industry ridiculing and objectifying the female body. She points out that many girls across the globe starve themselves to death because they want to look like the models in magazines. Women even pay thousands of money to get plastic surgery to make their breasts bigger, to remove their wrinkles, to look 10 years younger, to remove extra fat in their bodies, to make their lips bigger, to reshape their nose, etc. I’m sure we’ve all been at that stage in which we flipped through countless magazines and admired some of the models and wished you could be as skinny or as beautiful as her. But we all know the truth; no one, even those models in the magazines, don’t look like that. 

This film demonstrated how convincing it is for the advertising industry to send out negative messages that can affect women of all ages, such as eating-disorders, rape, murder, etc. Although we all live in a world with gender equality, watching this documentary made me realize that there still remains this stereotypical view of women as the weaker sex in a male dominated world. As we saw in the film, Jean Kilbourne showed a few pictures in which women were taken advantage by men. Men are usually portrayed as dominant, assertive, and powerful whereas women portrayed as innocent, passive, dependent human beings, and easy, which draws the idea that women are less human than men. Although this idea was very disturbing to me and hopefully for some other viewers, these advertisements appeal not only to male consumers but also to female consumers because it makes them believe that the ideal women (in those advertisements) is the way men would want women to be. The continuous use of women as sex objects to sell products disgusts me and seeing the images of women in the advertisements in the film terrified me. 

While watching this documentary, it made me think of Lady Gaga’s recent song, Born This Way, because she wants to send the message across to everyone in the world that no one should be pressured into thinking that they should change their appearance because everyone is beautiful, which is similar to what Jean Kilbourne wants people to believe in. The increase in the portrayal of women as sex objects in advertisements has been increasing in the last 50 years and if this violence against women and the objectification of women’s body continues, we might end up going back in time of male superiority. Consumers around the world have become obsessed with becoming this perfect woman like the ones in advertisements, who actually exists only in the Photoshop world. I think it’s great that people like Lady Gaga, who has a tremendous influence on women of all ages, is helping women realize that they are beautiful, just the way they are.