Imagine President Bush appearing on TV to give the following address…
           “My fellow Americans, our nation is
suffering at the hands of a particularly insidious group of domestic terrorists
— and by terrorists, I mean people who make our lives miserable by creating
fear. This group spends billions of dollars and enlists the help of
unscrupulous scientists to make us feel that we — the American people, the
strong, the brave, the self-reliant — are weak and needy in myriad ways.
           “They make us feel ugly, old, and
poor. They tell us we’re failures in everything we do, that our jobs aren’t
good enough, we’re not raising our kids right, we’re lousy in bed.
           “We believe them. But worse than
that, we give them our money by the truckload. They then take a significant
amount of that money and use it to terrorize us again and again, thousands of
times a year, and to assault the next generation, our children, with a barrage
of the same psychological weaponry.
           “This psychological warfare must
end….”
           There are several reasons why Bush
will never give this speech. But the idea that what it says isn’t true is not
among them.
           For one thing, the group he’d be
referring to is the advertising industry. For another, the rabid consumerism
advertising feeds is widely considered a necessary component of a “healthy
economy.” And Bush himself, as is the case with most politicians, uses the same
tactics, and employs the same people, to sell himself and his policies to us.
           Welcome to Dr. Jean Kilbourne’s
world.
           Kilbourne is among the most widely
respected, tireless, and visible critics of the advertising industry in the
world. She’s been examining the societal and psychological effects of
advertising, and speaking out on advertising’s influence, particularly its
devastating effect on young women and girls, for over three decades.
           In that time, she has lectured at
thousands of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, and
spoken before countless private institutions and community and professional
groups. She will deliver a lecture titled “The Naked Truth: Sex and Advertising”
on Tuesday, May 6, at the Memorial Art Gallery.
           Documentary films based on her
lectures include 1979’s seminal Killing
Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women (which has since been remade and
updated twice, as Still Killing Us Softly and Killing Us Softly III), Slim Hopes: Advertising and the Obsession
with Thinness, and Pack of Lies: The
Advertising of Tobacco.
           An expert on addictions, gender
issues, and the media, Kilbourne has served as an advisor to two former
Surgeons General — C. Everett Koop and Antonia Novello —- and was appointed
to serve on the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in
1993.
           Kilbourne has been a Visiting
Scholar at Wellesley College in Massachusetts since 1984. Her first book is
2000’s Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising
Changes the Way We Think and Feel.
City: You’ve been at this for three decades now. What new things
are you learning?
           Kilbourne:
What’s really new isn’t so much what I’ve been saying, because what I’m
saying has continued to be true and to get worse — things like the tyranny of
the ideal image, and the obsession with thinness, and the exploitation of
little girls. If anything, it just continues to get worse and more
sophisticated.
           But what is new is that there’s much
more resistance to it than there was when I started. It’s more organized. There
are far more groups.
           City:What do you say to people who look at
your research and say, “Well, what else do you expect from Madison Avenue? This
is their job, to get people to buy products. Would you expect anything more
principled from these ad people?”
           Kilbourne: Well, probably not. Although there are, certainly, people within the
advertising industry who are very concerned about these issues, and there are
agencies that don’t do this sort of thing. There are agencies that refuse to
take tobacco accounts, for example, and agencies that are much more sensitive
than others to the image of women. I’m not demonizing all advertisers.
           But, in general, the prevailing
ethic in the country certainly is — and more so than ever, these days —
that whatever makes a buck is good. And if that means that you need to target
children and sell them junk food, you do it. Or if you need to sell cigarettes
to 12-year-old girls by making them feel afraid about gaining weight, you do
it.
           From the people who buy that —
that profit is all that matters — I expect nothing different from what we’re
getting. I don’t expect change to come from the advertisers. Change is gonna
come from citizens demanding change and being educated enough to respond
differently to the images, so that advertisers will be forced to change,
because the old images won’t work.
           City:
Why are ads that play off human
needs, fears, and weaknesses more successful than those that empower people or
make them feel good about themselves?
           Kilbourne:
I guess because those needs and fears run so deep. Advertising is mostly
aimed at our unconscious. An editor-in-chief of Ad Age said a while ago that only eight percent of an ad’s message
is perceived by the conscious mind, and the rest is worked and reworked
unconsciously. And, of course, Freud taught us that sex and death are the two
big unconscious factors. So I think that they can prey on those very deep,
unconscious motivations and elicit a deeper response than a more superficial
image will.
           But, of course, in order to do that,
they need to make us feel not-OK the way we are. The message has to be that
there’s something missing in us, in our lives, about our bodies — something
wrong that needs to be fixed — in order for the ad to work.
           Therefore, one byproduct of all this
advertising is we’re barraged by the message that we’re lacking in some way.
For women, our bodies aren’t good enough, we’re not thin enough. For men,
you’re not rich and successful enough. For couples, you’re not having exciting
enough sex. Whatever it is, the message is one of lack and inferiority in some
way that can then only be remedied by buying the product.
           So, in addition to selling the
product, they’re selling this deep-rooted discontent with ourselves, with our
marriages, with our children, with everything.
           City:
And we’re buying it.
           Kilbourne: And it’s hard
not to buy it. It really is. Even if you’re savvy, and most people are to some
extent. It’s hard not to buy it, because these messages are very powerfully
designed. Billions of dollars are spent on psychological research and little
focus groups. Psychologists get in on the act. So, it’s not like we’re stupid.
It’s just that we’re really being barraged by the most sophisticated propaganda
campaign in the history of the world.
City: If the gender stereotypes and messages in commercials are
bad, what about the messages in the shows (sitcoms, dramas) themselves?
           Kilbourne: TV programs exist for one reason, and that is to draw audiences to advertisers,
to sell audiences to advertisers, to make sure that people are there for the
commercials. So they constantly reinforce the values of the commercials.
           An obvious example is Friends, where these extraordinarily
thin women star in Friends, and it’s
brought to you by Diet Pepsi. It’s not a coincidence. Friends is a good show in many ways. But it exists for one purpose
only, and that is to get people there for the Diet Pepsi ads, and get people
there who are going to be in the mood for those ads, too — who are gonna
think, “Boy, if I drink this, maybe I’ll be as skinny as Jennifer Aniston.”
           City:What affect does advertising have on our
political consciousness?
           Kilbourne:
I think it’s totally destroying our democracy, to tell you the truth. For
starters, just the actual way in which candidates are packaged and sold is a
grave threat to our democracy, for two reasons:
           One is because it really does often
lead people to vote against their own best interests. People end up feeling
that they’re informed about where candidates really stand on issues, but
they’re not. Then they end up voting against their own best interests, because
they’ve been manipulated by these very slick ads.
           These ads are done exactly the way
ads for cigarettes and beer and cars are done. They’re done with focus groups.
They’re done with psychological research. They’re done to stir up emotion. And
they’re done to affect us unconsciously. So, candidates can wrap themselves in
the flag and everybody thinks one thing, whereas, in fact, the candidate may
believe something totally different.
           The other thing that is a huge
factor here is that it’s because of advertising that politicians have to raise
such huge amounts of money. They have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars
in order to run for office, in order to afford advertising. That’s what it’s
about, the ads and the broadcast time.
           Because of that, they have to get
the money from big business — there’s no other place to get it. And by the
time they have enough money to run for office, they’re already corrupted, they
owe so many favors to so many companies that there’s no way that they’re going
to be able to vote their conscience. They’re gonna have to pay back.
           City:They also create apathy.
           Kilbourne:
A profound sense of apathy. That’s why so few people vote, why people feel
that nothing really makes any difference, and why people make the tragic
mistake of thinking that all candidates are the same. They are not all the
same. But the sameness of the commercials makes us believe that they’re somehow
all the same.
Dr. Jean
Kilbourne gives a lecture titled “”The Naked Truth: Sex and Advertising” on Tuesday, May
6, at the Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Avenue, at 6 p.m. (reception at
5 p.m.). Tix: $15 (students free). 546-2771 x330 or www.pprsr.org.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2003.
