Questions on reading materials

Set 1

Kilbourne sees that sex in advertisements’ main goal is just as the pornography—it is about the exploitation of female beauty, showing the dominance of male over female. It dehumanizes and objectifies women, making women ensnare and become the playing things of men; also, the poses and postures of sex elements in advertisements are borrowed from pornography. As a matter of fact, advertisements, just like pornography, cannot meet men’s sexual desire and need of emotions. The pictures of advertisements used by the author are good demonstrations that may prove her argument, for they show us how women are used to allure the potential consumers by exposing sexual attractiveness for them, while in fact they have no direct links with the product itself. They are only used to appeal others, just like alluring objectives.

It is dangerous to depict women as sex objects because it encourages men’s use of violence and sexual abuse to the women, and it will leave a bad image in men’s mind that women should be subdued and they will never take “no” for an answer. Objectification of women is troubling because it creates a climate of the widespread of violence, and to justify violence against women, for it is hard to use violence on someone you think as of equal human rights. I agree with Kilbourne’s point on that, only if men stop viewing women as merely objects or toys they can pay whenever they want will there be true equality between men and women, and women will not be hurt by those advertisements linked with pornography.

Kilbourne first raised the point that sex in advertisements is pornographic because it dehumanizes and objectifies women. Then, she raised several advertisements of different brands, such as watches, perfume, alcohol, and explains the hidden content of bondage, sexual aggression and rape. The author later describes the unequal status of men and women in the society, pointing out that the discrimination of one sex against the other would make the weaker sex think that it is normal for them to be discriminated, and they will form “juries” to judge other women by that unequal standard. 

By saying “cultural abuse”, Kilbourne really means that due to the unequal position of men and women in the society, women are often put in a way as if they can be easily harassed or attacked by the men who are in the dominance of power and status. Kilbourne suggests in her article several times that the appeal of advertisements that contain sexual elements have been surrounding the female as soon as they are born, and they have encouraged male to commit sexual violence and harassment, and female addictions to these violation of their rights. Kilbourne’s argument of advertisements’ influence to the society is very strong and convincible, but her remarks on children committing sexual harassment to classmates are not strong enough to prove her point that they are affected by advertisements with sexual elements, at least no direct proof of relations between two.

In English version of Vogue (published in January, 2014), Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton’s commercials all put young ladies’ pictures to publicize their brands. They are not quite referred to the “pornographic” ads that Kilbourne has mentioned in her article, but they are also not linked to the relational skills that Kilbourne wants to see, but pure demonstration of women’s body or the products in their hands. They are more related to Fowles’s “need for attention”, for it will be a pleasant things buying products same as those held in fair ladies’ hands in the ads. The famous magazine aimed for male, the Playboy, is closely linked to “the need for sex”. All the girls on its cover are extremely sexy ones that are very similar to Kilbourne’s theory of pornographic ads that appeals to man. In the American version of Playboy published in January, 2012, the perfume Guess used a half-naked man with a woman holding him behind as their picture and the words “seductive home” to publicize the brand; and the similar things can be found in the advertisement of the perfume brand Curve, which says “curve fragrances for men”. These ads in the Playboy are all very same to the view proposed by Kilbourne, and had nothing to do with relational skills.

Set 2

By connecting to social network, people are being rated and watched over by hundreds of people they don’t know at all, their lives become things that can be marketed, and friends have become consumers. Social networks have actually affected the children’s development, in terms of changes in personality and value. Furthermore, they conceptualize relations between teenagers, making them narcissists, disconnecting them from inner experiences, etc. Selfies are often seen on the social networks I use, the words that are published with the pictures are often irrelevant, sometimes even meaningless, but they often get many replies from different people, most of which are praises, and there are also some sorts of swearing. A girl on a Chinese social media, Renren, posted several photos of not wearing underwear and asks people to guess and identify whether she wears underwear or not. There are a lot comments below saying “I want to see your breasts naked”, etc. This is a vivid demonstration of the appeal to sex in Fowles’s theory.

Cyberbullying girls is distressing and comfortable for those who commit that, and it is also due to the unequal status of female in our real life, due to the sexuality discrimination held by male against female. Sometimes the girls would even victimize themselves and comply with the demand of men, which is worrying. I have witnessed a famous Chinese movie star, Shu Qi, being cyberbullied by microblog users just because she had played in X-rated movies when she was young, people called her “sluts” or “immoral”, and she was forced to delete all microblogs.

“Sexting” has both links and ties with freedom of speech and sexual power. On the one hand, it is true that people can say and comment as they like, as long as they don’t step over the law and proper social morality, and as our society becomes more tolerant, sexting, under many circumstances, is longer seen as a rude or vulgar performance; on the other hand, sexting is often sent to female from male, and female would sometimes comply with them, showing that it is actually linked tightly to the dominance of sexual power of male, and female have few ways to stop it. 

Orenstein’s worry about the loss of control is legitimate and easy to understand—in a time when people have almost limitless access to social networks, privacy has become a thing that is nearly impossible to protect, while the violation of privacy is often illegitimate and should be held responsible of the loss of others under the rule of law. A good way to restrict it on social networks is to limit the photo sent to a “readable” mode only, which means the photo can only be viewed online with your social network account and cannot be forwarded or shared to others, and the photo can only be viewed by the receiver of the forwarded pictures.

By saying “forge intimacy and undermine it”, Orenstein really means that social networks make people more familiar with each other than ever, for they can look at their friends and other people’s activities almost limitlessly, which makes their relations more intimate; from another perspective, it makes cyberbully and other kinds of online harassments more common and threatening, making people disbelieve others and undermine intimacy as well, for you cannot tell who will be the next to commit cyberbully. Orenstein’s view of social media’s impact to teenagers is a two-way argument: she concedes the social media’s merits and convenience, whereas she is very worried that they will brand teenagers and bring bad effects and paradigms, especially sexual ones to the teens. My opinion is that social media is a great way getting to access to the world for it has a lot of shared contents on different aspects, and by reading which you will become more knowledgeable and tolerant; but its invasion to private space also brings about alert on the protection of privacy, which I am also very concerned.