A conversation with Jean Kilbourne

When I was around nine years old, some nights, once the lights had been switched off I would sneak out onto the landing. There, as the hum of my mum watching television droned on beneath me, I posed in front of a full-length mirror. I hitched up my nightdress and pouted my lips, tilted back my head, popped my hip, and squinted my eyes. I surveyed myself. 

I am not sure if I was cognizant of trying to be "sexy." I was just aping the images I had seen of women. My household wasn't one with fashion magazines; I was modeling poses from advertising, television, and film. 

It was after reading Emily Ratajkowski's piece 'Buying Myself Back' in New York magazine, I had remembered I'd done this. In the essay, the model shares the lost ownership of images of herself through a series of powerful vignettes. The centerpiece is Ratajkowski's recollection of a shoot she did with photographer Jonathan Leder. At one point, he shows her some polaroids of another woman he has shot; she writes, "something switched inside me then. As I looked at the images. I grew competitive. This guy shoots all these women, but I'm going to show him that I'm the sexiest and smartest of them all. That I am special." Leder goes on to assault Ratajkowski sexually and circulate — without her permission — the images he took; they feature in books, exhibitions, and on T-shirts sold by ASOS. The piece laid bare so profoundly the vulnerabilities of the women we copy and judge, the models that personify our fantasies in advertisements. It got me thinking about my relationship with those women and their impact on me as a young person. 

There is a history of females pushing back against how models are depicted in the media. In 1995 while waiting to go to a R.E.M. concert, Kathy Bruin had enough. She became incensed as she saw busses hiss and jiggle past her emblazoned with an image of Kate Moss advertising Obsession for men by Calvin Klein. 

Bruin told the website Insite, "Moss [was] lying naked. The photo highlighted her sunken eyes and all of her bones. The way she was lit made her look as emaciated as possible. I had been thinking, 'Why is this campaign still going on? Why don't people get angry about this?'" At the concert, she had the idea to print out the image and slap "Emaciated" and "Starvation Stinks" on top and paste it up around San Francisco, where she lived. The stunt garnered national media attention, and in 1997 Bruin set up a website called About Face that had a gallery of offenders that showcased problematic ads and other resources for women. In 1999 she toldAdweek, "we want to give people the idea that they can voice their opinion. We're saying, 'You're the consumer. You're the person they're trying to reach.'"

Another woman who has dedicated her career to exploring the impact advertising images have on society is activist, speaker and writer Jean Kilbourne, who I was lucky enough to interview this week. In the late 1960s, Jean began her investigation of the connection between advertising and several public health issues, including violence against women, eating disorders, and addiction, and launched a movement to promote media literacy as a way to prevent these problems. The first person to do this work, she started collecting advertisements and displaying them on her fridge. In 1979 she created the groundbreaking film Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Images of Women, which has since been revised and updated three more times. American professor Brené Brown said that Jean's work "changed the way I see the world and myself."

If we are to explore the harm the fashion industry does, not only to the planet but also to people, in a fulsome way, we have to look at fashion photography. It tugs on our fears, our inadequacies and sells us promises that buying something will make us whole or "happy," in turn fueling consumption. It also presents stereotypes that become ingrained in society and are challenging to break. Jean speaks about how advertising claims to be a mirror to society, merely reflecting ourselves back at us. However, she argues that it is more pernicious than that. We need a greater understanding of how to read these images to empower us to understand that advertisements really matter. As a society, like Ratajkowski, we need to "buy" ourselves back or perhaps "reclaim" is a better word. 

Shonagh Marshall: Why did you first start collecting advertisements? 

Jean Kilbourne: When I look back, I sometimes feel absolutely everything in my life led to this — although it was not deliberate. In the late 1960s I'd been very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. As it did for many people in my generation, that led to my being active in the women's movement. 

Another piece was that I'd worked in the media — in very low-level jobs. This was 50 plus years ago, so women didn't have many opportunities. I went to Wellesley College, one of the country's best (where Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright went). When I graduated, I had to go to secretarial school to get a job!  Most of my classmates got married right after graduation, but I wasn't interested in that — so I was a waitress and a secretary. I won a special award my senior year that enabled me to work for the BBC in London as a secretary after graduation.  I did that for about a  year.  The job wasn't exciting, but it was certainly interesting to live in London and be part of the BBC. 

Another critical piece was that I did some modeling at that time. That was one of the few ways that a woman could make a lot of money. It was very seductive and compelling in some ways. Of course, everyone thought it was wonderful, a great opportunity that one shouldn't pass up, etc. But it was also soul-destroying; there was a lot of sexual harassment. I was very objectified but at the time there wasn't even language to describe it. So, although it was a way to make money, it was not a pleasant experience.

After I returned to the U.S., I had a string of very boring jobs.  One of them was placing ads into The Lancet, the British medical journal. An ad for a birth control pill called Ovulen-21 said, "Ovulen-21 works the way a woman thinks. By weekdays, not by cycle days." The image was of a woman's face, and in her head were seven boxes, one for each day of the week. Monday was a laundry basket, Tuesday was an iron, and so on. The ad was basically saying that women are too stupid to remember their cycles, but they can remember the days of the week. I looked at this, and I thought, “This is appalling, and it's not trivial.”

That was the first ad I put on my refrigerator. Then I started collecting others and soon there were so many. I was the first person to look at this in any serious way. After a while  I began to see patterns in how women were being presented. I had no intention of making a career out of this, but I bought a camera, a macro lens, a copy stand, and I turned the photos into slides and made a slide presentation. I became a teacher, and I found that the presentation  was a very effective way to teach about sexism and the media. Gradually I was invited to speak to larger and larger groups.  Eventually I got an agent, quit my day job, and went out on the road. I have been self-employed and doing that full-time since 1977. 

Shonagh: Why did you decide to make the film Killing Us Softly (1979)?

Jean: I realized that I could be on the road for 18 lifetimes, and I wouldn't be able to reach as many people as a film would. So in 1979, I made the film Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women. It was an incredibly cheap film; it cost $6,000 to make. In today's language, it went "viral." There was no marketing for it, but it just exploded. Since then, I've remade it three times, and it's become one of the most popular educational films of all time. 

Shonagh: For those who haven't seen the Killing Us Softly films, what do they consist of?

Jean: The first one was simply a one-shot recording of me giving a lecture. My lecture was maybe 45 minutes; we cut it down to 25. I made the second film with the same company, and in that one, I interspersed interviews. After that, I moved to the Media Education Foundation, which is a terrific film company. I've made all my films since with them. All the films are filmed versions of me giving a lecture.

In the late 70s, there were very few feminist films out there. In those days people used to say that feminists had no sense of humor, so one thing I think helped make my films and lectures successful is that they are funny. I encourage people to laugh at the ads. I often think of what I do as a kind of judo. I use all the weight and power of the advertising industry against them by encouraging people to ridicule the advertisements and laugh at them. When the first Killing Us Softly came out in classrooms around the country, students would be thinking: We're going to see a polemic about how women are stereotyped. What they got instead was funny, lively, and very fast-paced. Nobody was looking at this issue or taking it seriously. And nobody had even written anything about it. To my amazement, people still say to me today, I saw your film or your lecture, and I've never looked at advertising in the same way again.

Shonagh: Although there is an awareness today, media literacy still seems to be low.

Jean: I've always considered myself, above all, an educator and an advocate for media literacy. I don't do this to influence the advertisers. I mean, the advertisers will only change if consumers demand change. They're not going to be in the vanguard of social change; although they may pretend to be, they're not going to be. It would make a huge difference if media literacy were taught in the school, beginning in kindergarten. Marketers now know that babies at the age of six months can recognize corporate logos. That's the age at which they're starting to target our children, so we need to start right away, helping kids become much more aware of this. 

Shonagh: You also got some criticism for what you were saying in Killing Us Softly. What type of things did people say?

Jean: At that time, almost everybody said, Oh, advertising is stupid, silly, trivial, and doesn't make any difference. Even other feminists said to me; we don't have time to deal with this issue. We're dealing with severe problems like violence against women. To which I would say, This is related. When women are objectified and surrounded by images of objectified women — dismembered bodies, for example — it creates a climate in which violence and abuse become much more likely; they become normalized. It is not a separate issue and certainly not a trivial issue; it is deeply connected to how women are perceived and treated. That was always my feeling, and I still feel that way. By now research has validated this. I think everybody knows today that advertising is not trivial. And that it certainly does have an impact. Objectified images throughout the media do create a climate in which violence is encouraged. All these years later, even though people are at least somewhat more aware, many are still shocked by Killing Us Softly.

One of the things I've learned early on as a public speaker is that if you're going to present a case, you should answer any arguments in the first five minutes. Otherwise, people will sit in the audience thinking, Maybe I agree, but I can’t wait to raise my hand and bring up this argument. Another thing to keep in mind is that I started speaking in the 70s when many people still thought a woman shouldn't be speaking in public, let alone about sexism. I was dealing with a fraught topic. 

The two main arguments against what I was presenting were that advertising is trivial and people ignore it, so therefore it doesn’t affect them.  So I would always start with that. I would acknowledge that we all believe we're not influenced by advertising, but in fact, it's designed to influence us on a subconscious emotional level. 

The other argument is that advertising simply reflects the attitudes and values of a society. So I would talk about that as well. If we're each exposed to around 5000 ads a day, that's a lot more than reflection; that's a kind of drill. We get these images over and over and over again. Also, advertising carefully selects which attitudes and values to reflect. It only reflects capitalist and consumer values and certainly doesn't reflect, for lack of a better word, spiritual values. Although it often coopts them, it doesn't truly reflect them. It doesn't just reflect the ideal image of beauty; it creates the ideal image of beauty because it chooses what we're going to see as beautiful. In the course of my work, I've seen this happen with the ideal female body type, which used to be relatively curvy. If you look at Marilyn Monroe and other women in movies from that time, they are voluptuous by today's standards. For at least a couple of decades now,  we mostly see extremely thin models. If almost every ad we see that presents a woman as attractive shows her as extraordinarily thin, that changes how we see and define beauty. If we never see an older woman presented as beautiful unless she somehow miraculously still looks like a much younger woman, that changes how we read and look at women's faces. 

So It's not trivial, and it's not simply reflecting; it's doing something a great deal more powerful and influential than that. 

A fair amount of what advertising does isn't conscious or intentional on the part of the advertisers. I don't think they're setting out to create eating disorders or to wreck our psyches!  They’re trying to sell products in what they believe is the most effective way. One way to do that is to create anxiety, to make people feel that they're not okay as they are.  I don't think there's a group of people in boardrooms saying, how can we screw up young girls? I hope not. Nonetheless, that is the unintended result of a whole lot of this kind of advertising.

Ads sell a lot more than products. They sell images and values and concepts of love and sexuality, and they sell an idea of "normalcy." Again, some of that is not intended by the advertisers, but it is sold nonetheless.

Shonagh: In all your years of research, have you been able to determine what impact advertising has had on society? 

Jean: It's hard to measure the effects of advertising. There are no control groups. To do an actual study, you'd have to have a group of people who have not been exposed to advertising, which is impossible to find. Many studies have to set up an artificial control group which usually doesn't work very well.  Even if people haven't seen a particular ad, they’ve been exposed to massive doses of advertising throughout their lives. 

One of the things that the negative image of women in advertising does is make women feel bad about themselves and each other. It also makes men devalue not only women but also all those qualities that are considered “feminine.”

One of the ads I use to illustrate this is a tobacco ad featuring a guy with a tattoo of a woman on his bicep.  The copy says, “You’re looking at my feminine side.” This ad is aimed at teenage boys and the underlying message is that you better not have a feminine side.  Don't be vulnerable, don't be a wuss. 

Then there's the effect of advertising in general, which encourages not only stereotypes but also consumerism. Advertising makes it seem like life is all about what and how much you buy. From the beginning I called advertising the propaganda of capitalism. It is the engine that drives capitalism. It tells you that what you have isn't good enough and you're not good enough. You need this, this, and this. You need to get rid of old things and buy new things. Of course, now we're learning that this is destroying the planet. 

Shonagh: Yes. Consumption has now overtaken population growth as the most significant threat to the planet. How much do you think advertising is to blame for the rate we are consuming? 

Jean: It's certainly not entirely to blame, but it does play a huge role in at least a couple of ways. One is the way it encourages consumption and a throwaway mentality — the idea that whatever you have, you should get rid of it and get the next thing. People don't get things repaired anymore —  including me, for that matter.

The other way I think it contributes to climate change is that these industries, particularly the fossil fuel industries, have so much money, and their advertising is designed to mislead people; it's a kind of disinformation, propaganda campaign. The idea of Exxon Mobil being green, the whole thing, is just ridiculous. There's been greenwashing in advertising for quite a while now, where companies try to convince people that they're doing good things and that they're not part of the problem. This, combined with a population that is not media literate, means that people are quickly duped and taken in. 

Shonagh: Because of the scale of the escalating crisis and the role fashion advertising plays, I have wondered if we should ban fashion advertising, like the way smoking adverts were banned. What do you think of this idea?

Jean: What's interesting is when people said 30 or 40 years ago, let's ban tobacco advertising, people were shocked by that. It was a non-starter. So you're at the beginning of that phase, asking, Is this something that we should do? 

In general, I have not been much of an advocate for banning advertising, except tobacco advertising because tobacco is the only legal product that kills people when used as intended. I was active in the anti-tobacco movement. But I haven't been trying to get ads banned because I didn't want to get sidetracked.  And I didn’t want people to see me, mainly when I was talking about alcohol, as a prohibitionist, another Carrie Nation. But I think asking about banning fashion advertising is a provocative and fascinating question.

We still haven't been able to ban tobacco advertising entirely. We've made progress, but we haven't banned it. The evidence against tobacco is horrendous, so I can't even imagine what it would take to ban fashion advertising. But it would be fascinating to have the discussion. 

Shonagh: I am hosting a panel discussion on the 18th of October at the School of Visual Arts (more details coming soon), where we will talk about what the impact of banning fashion advertising might be. Regarding the climate crisis and the changes we need to make, I have been thinking about how the introduction of seat belts was rolled out. Do you see parallels?

Jean: When seat belts were introduced, I'm sure many people felt it was an attack on their freedom.  Mostly, however,  it was the automobile industry that didn't want to put seat belts in cars because of the added expense. In the same way, the tobacco industry was against everything and anything that might have made a real difference in reducing consumption. 

Shonagh: In Killing Us Softly 4, released in 2010, you say things haven't gotten better since doing this work. They have gotten worse. Eleven years later, is this still the case? Or do you think things have changed in the way people are presented in advertising and its role in society?

Jean: In some ways, things have gotten worse, or they have stayed the same. By that, I mean the kinds of themes that I talked about, starting 50 years ago, such as the tyranny of the ideal image of beauty. It’s as bad as it's ever been, even though, yes, there's more diversity. There's even some more diversity in terms of models who aren’t "perfect-looking,” which is good. But by and large, the ideal image of beauty is still young, thin, white or light-skinned. When older women are shown as beautiful, they look much younger than their actual age — through surgery, cosmetics, or Photoshop. We still never see a realistic photograph of an older woman presented as attractive.

The sexualization of girls is still terrible. There's still a whole lot of sexualization of little girls and teenagers. Some of this is made worse by social media, which of course, didn't exist when I started. Now girls and young women can Photoshop their images and post them. This creates a whole other level of pressure to achieve a particular look. So in all those ways, things have gotten worse.

What has gotten much better is that when I started, I was alone. Nobody else was doing this. I had to convince people this was important. Now there's a tremendous amount of research; there are films, books, websites, and social media accounts. People are taking this seriously. So that gives me hope. I see many young people who are also trying to bring about change, which gives me hope.

So ultimately, it is worse in some ways and better in others.

Shonagh: Thank you very much, Jean, for talking to me today. My final question is, what would your utopia be? What would that world look like if you could wake up in a dream vision for the future?

Jean: That's a great question. Broadly speaking, I'd love a world in which we honored and respected nature. For many reasons, not only because we need it to live, but because, for me anyway, especially the older I get, it brings me the most solace. So I would not only call a halt to the damage that we're doing, but I would want us to be more reverential towards nature and also to treat animals a whole lot better than we do. It's all related. It would be a world where there was much more harmony with human beings, animals, and nature.

It would also be a world in which every person could feel attractive and desirable, regardless of whether or not they checked the boxes we currently have. There wouldn't be any more pressure on women than on men to look a certain way; there would just be a whole lot more latitude for everybody. With much less emphasis on fashion, we could still be playful and adorn ourselves, but it would be more from the spirit of fun and playfulness than from necessity. Also, that wouldn't necessarily have to be done with stuff that you bought.

Every time I talk like this, I think of the Native American approach to the planet.

There would be an end to racism—an end to judging people in all the ways we have done in this world. Everybody's humanity would be valued and appreciated within their own definition. All people would be free. This is indeed utopian!