Cutting Down Size

"Cutting Girls Down to Size"

We've all heard the the argument that magazines, television, movies, and advertisements are causing girls to feel more and more insecure about their physical appearance. Many of us have seen the statistics and studies, the ones that say things like "40 to 80 percent of fourth-grade girls are dieting" and "one-third of twelve- to thirteen-year-old girls are actively trying to lose weight by dieting, vomiting, using laxatives, or taking diet pills" (Kilbourne 261). In her article, "The More You Subtract, The More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size," Jean Kilbourne shows clearly the effect she believes the media has on women, especially young women.

It is pretty easy to see how various forms of media can influence the young women of our culture to feel bad about the way they look. We are bombarded with images of incredibly thin women with perfect skin and hair. What girl wouldn't feel bad about themselves after look at hundreds of perfect-looking women? But Kilbourne's argument is even deeper here. She argues that body image isn't the only thing our media influences. She argues that not only are these images causing women to feel like they need to be "cut down to size" physically; they are also cutting women down in regards to the power and voice.

Kilbourne mentions a number of examples of phrases from advertisements that seem to encourage this idea, some of them saying things like: "make a statement without saying a word," "The silence of a look can reveal more than words," and "More than words can say" (Kilbourne 263). All of these advertisements come from perfumes, clothing, or makeup products. It's as if these advertisements are saying to girls, "your voice doesn't matter. What matters is your appearance," and Kilbourne would argue that's exactly what they're saying.

This kind of message can have a huge negative effect on women, especially young women. Teenagers already have a low self esteem because of the many changes they are going through. They also have a tendency to believe that their voice doesn't matter because they are still children. The girls who are bombarded with these silence messages, then, get it twice. And fitting in is one of the most important things to girls this age, which means they are more likely to follow the advice of these advertisements in the hopes that it will make them fit in. Those that don't are often seen as strange or even masculine.

Some companies have recognised this problem, and at least one has started doing something about it. Dove's self esteem campaign, of which the following video is a part of, has attempted to do something about it. And while it is very true that this campaign is far from enough, it is a step in the right direction.

A Catering Service for Females
When most people hear the word “catering” they often think of a service that brings food to a location and then serves it to the people there, whether it be a party, a wedding, a funeral, or a business meeting. And yet this is not the only type of catering that is being done in our 21st century society and ironically the other type of catering discourages the consumption of food. Advertisements and their catering towards women develop an ideal vision that is virtually unattainable and leads women on a constant search that ends in disappointment, low self-esteem, eating disorders, and on occasion, death. Looking at advertisements that focused on women from the past fifty years shows that ads only portrayed that time period’s “beautiful woman” then as well. This type of targeting has always been present to some extent but it is becoming progressively more out of control and dangerous as time goes by. The role that advertisements play in the daily life of females has become quite a vicious cycle that seems to have no apparent end.
There is no doubt about it that female adolescents take the biggest blow from the advertising world. Being what is referred to now as a “pre-teen” as well as being a teenager is no easy task. Both males and females begin to deal with peer pressure at this age, although it differs by gender. While males are pressured into being big, strong, and muscular and are expected to eat a lot, females begin receiving their first pressures to be small and thin, and to eat quite a lot less than their bodies actually need to stay healthy. Teenagers are very vulnerable and sensitive to the world around them. All of a sudden one of the most important things is suddenly to be “in” and “cool” and what is a better source to determine what is in and cool than the large amounts of advertisements that teenagers are exposed to on a daily basis. Ads that tell girls everything from how to be the girl that the guys go for, how to pick out the right purse that conveys the right message about you, how to come out on top when competing with other girls for the attention of a boy, and how to lose weight.
The most common ads tell adolescent girls that their values need to change if they are not about smelling good, being thin, having the right clothes from the fashionable stores, and never having a blemish. As Jean Kilbourne says in her article entitled “The More You Subtract the More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size,” “Girls of all ages get the message that they must be flawlessly beautiful and, above all these days, they must be thin” (Kilbourne, 158). The majority of the models that they see in advertisements are more often than not, anywhere from five to ten years older than them. They are built tall and constantly on diets to be as thin as they are. Along with that, excessive amounts of time are spent getting them ready for a photo shoot and then after the photo shoot just as much time is spent photoshopping away excess skin, pores, and wrinkles. The women who are shown in advertisements are not real and their look and body type is certainly not attainable. It is a fantasy world and yet for the majority of females it becomes their unsuccessful reality.
If I were to ask around, the majority of all women would say that they don’t feel like advertisements have any real hold or affect upon them. But whether women want to admit it or not the images and messages in ads have a subconscious hold on us that translates into how we view our own bodies. In the words of Jean Kilbourne in her article titled “The More You Subtract the More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size,” “The glossy images of flawlessly beautiful and extremely thin women that surround us would not have the impact that they do if we did not live in a culture that encourages women to believe that they can and should remake their bodies into perfect commodities” (Kilbourne, 158). When a woman is exposed to over three hundred advertisements a day that show thin, beautiful flawless models it is virtually impossible for her to not compare herself to these unrealistic body types. If these are the women that are shown with the sexy man in the bar or at a fun summer party with her good looking husband and two gorgeous healthy children then that is the body that will get you these things. Without a flawless, perfect body you are not worth looking at, dating, or creating a life with are just a few of the messages that these ads scream at the female passerbyers.
The majority of these ads that have this message create quite a double standard for females of all ages. Kilbourne explains this phenomena well when she says, “Girls are promised fulfillment both through being thin and eating rich foods, just as they are promised fulfillment through being innocent and virginal and through wild and impulsive sex” (Kilbourne, 165). Kilbourne’s message is clear. One cannot eat rich foods and still be as thin as the models eating the food in the ads. Women also cannot be innocent and virginal at the same time that they are having wild and impulsive sex. And yet the ads that are shoved in the faces of women show exactly that. How is a woman supposed to attain this body type and the lifestyle that comes along with it when contradictory messages are being showered upon her everyday? She’s not and she most certainly never will.
There is no doubt that contradictory messages of showing women who have bodies that are starved and photoshoped have a long-term negative affect upon the women in our society. When a woman is shown only perfect, flawless people advertising the products that she buys and uses she is bound to examine herself and wonder what on earth is wrong with her. She is using the exact same products as these gorgeous people and yet she looks nothing like them when she looks at herself in the mirror. She then wonders what she is doing wrong because her legs aren’t stick thin, she has slight wrinkles under her eyes, her hair isn’t as glossy, and her collarbones aren’t as defined. All of this wondering can lead to many different negative effects including obsessing over looks, quite a lot more stress and unease, self-hatred, eating disorders, and sadly enough, death. Kilbourne provides a quite adequate explanation of this with the following:
This tendency to view one’s body from the outside in – regarding physical attractiveness, sex appeal, measurements, and weight as more central to one’s physical identity than health, strength, energy level, coordination, or fitness – has many harmful effects, including diminished mental performance, increased feelings of shame and anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, and the development of eating disorders. (159)
A person can only take being told that her body isn’t up to par so many times before it starts getting to her head. No one can stand to be insulted and have their body type belittled over three hundred times a day without it affecting her in a serious and negative way. For some women always being told that their body just “isn’t enough” of one thing or is “too much” of another becomes unbearable and the only solution in their eyes is death. This is seen in Kilbourne’s statistic when she explains, “A survey in Massachusetts found that the single largest group of high school students considering or attempting suicide are girls who feel they are overweight” (Kilbourne, 160). While this statistic is extremely scary and disturbing, it is also very eye opening and if anything else, should help more people to realize that the way advertising affects women is serious and it is becoming more and more serious at a younger and younger age. More and more women are constantly becoming less and less satisfied with their bodies and taking drastic measures to change them, which in the long run seems to end in many different types of destruction.
What we as human beings can do to put an end to this downward spiral for women is a very overwhelming question and is constantly boggling the minds of psychologists and common everyday people alike. One answer might be to start educating both males and females at a young age on the topic of media interpretation and help them to realize that if we were to all work together as a community the media and advertisements don’t have to dictate us and how we treat ourselves. Through some very hard work and quite a lot of time we could eventually dictate it. While this task seems quite daunting, girls and women alike cannot continue on at the rate that we are traveling. We must flip it so that advertisements are catering towards us, real women in real life. Because ultimately real life is the only life that is both satisfying and worth living.

* As Erving Goffman pointed out in Gender Advertisements, we learn a great deal about the disparate power of males and fmales simply through the body language and poses of advertising. (265) * Girls try to make sense of the contradictory expectations of themselves in a culture dominated by advertising. Advertising is one of the most potent messengers in a culture that can be toxic for girls’ self-esteem. Indeed, if we looked only at advertising images, this would be bleak world for females. (259) * Girls of all ages get the message that they must be flawlessly beautiful and, above all these days, they must be thin. (260)