Killing Us Softly - 4

From the beginning of time it seems that woman have been put on this earth to please men, look good for them, and base their whole lives around them. We are told to look good or else we can’t attract a man; we have to have perfect hair, the perfect body and the perfect clothes because things like our personality aren’t important. The documentary Killing Us Softly 4 brings a lot of these ideas (and many others) into light. Coming from someone who has always struggled with body issues, confidence issues and eating problems, this documentary brought a lot of things into focus for me that I was never aware of. 

 

            Jean Kilbourne tells us that most advertisements use multiple parts of different women’s bodies (eyes, eyebrows, nose, chin) to make up one woman who is than considered “real” and “perfect”; this causes problems for women and especially younger girls because they’re given a fake idea of what is real and compare themselves to it and they also strive for it. Women end up judging themselves and comparing themselves to these fake, unrealistic women and in the end they end up having confidence issues and go to drastic measures to get a perfect body which can result in eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder. Women have to have big breasts, a tiny midsection and tiny thighs, which is unrealistic and leads women into having cosmetic procedures to attain this perfect body. In 10 years (1997-2007) cosmetic procedures rose 457% (12 million procedures peer year)!  The “Victorias Secret” models like Heidi Klum, Alessandria Ambroiso and Miranda Kerr have a body type that fewer than 5% of North American women have. These are also the women who are considered to be the most beautiful women in the world so every other women looks to them as role models and strives to look like them.  

Women then see themselves as an object and don’t respect their body as they should, they’re passive and they’re all about pleasing men and serving men instead of pleasing themselves and making themselves happy first. Men are seen as powerful in todays society and women are seen as less dominate, innocent and having little to no power. With this new standard in society women are being abused more often and this abuse is deemed okay with advertisements. Men now think it’s more than okay to verbally and abusively abuse women; advertisements have also been correlating sex with abuse.

Things have slowly (very slowly) been changing and trying to get women to look at their bodies in a positive light. Celebrities are speaking up about these issues and magazines are taking the time to help, like Seventeen Magazine with their “Body Peace” articles . With so many women/young girls who have eating disorders and confidence issues society has to find ways to turn around this “ideal” and “perfect” body that they’ve put out there and let women know that it’s okay to not have the perfect body because the perfect body does NOT exist, and everyone is different.