Through the movie Killing Us Softly 3, Jean kilbourne has given an interesting perspective in portraying to us what it means to be a woman according to the image we see in the media. She makes the argument that although it appears that women in this day and era have acquired power, it is a false sense of achievement and very short lived. She has dissected and discussed how the media and advertising companies have evolved in the last 20 years. Advertising is more a part of our lives today than it has ever been. In fact, advertising today has become a serious business with profits nearing 180 billion dollars a year, something that we all agree should be taken seriously. Consumers get bombarded by approximately 3000 ads per day and it has been estimated that the average consumers spends on average 3 years of their life watching just ads alone. No wonder that advertising is the foundation of the mass media. The problem that she points out is that while advertising is selling products it also perpetuates the ideas, values, beauty, and notions of love and happiness and, to a certain extent, the idea or concept of normalcy. This is the area that I personally have a problem with, since it also subliminally imposes on how to act, react and worst of all, be.
How does advertising cause that effect? How can it be so powerful? It starts by surrounding you with what it means to be beautiful, by creating or suggesting a false sense of beauty and making you feel diminished, not worthy and shameful, to the extent that if you don’t fall in that category of what they consider beauty, you have failed. It is powerful because failure is inevitable, since the main focus of beauty according to advertisers standards fall primarily at a body type that only 5 percent of the population have, therefore, setting you up for failure; However, not before telling you that you could try harder, that