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Alex Bortoc

Prof. Cacoilo

Media 384

12/09/2011

Progress Charged Guilty

The further humanity moved through time, the more creative and progressive we have

become in nearly every aspect of our life. However, progress has both positive and negative

effects. Advertising is one of the examples of that. It evolved from papyrus sheets and wooden

signs to modern day electronic billboards and TV commercials. Becoming more and more

sophisticated and tremendously successful, advertising industry by certain standards has got out

of hand, all in part due to modern technology.

Until the invention of radio and radio stations, advertisement was contained in one or

another form of writing. However, soon after radio became popular, people began hearing the

commercials. Thus a new medium was added. Not even fifty years later, with the popularization

of television, we began to see TV commercials. The advertisement expanded once again. By the

end of the twentieth century we could see ads on the internet. Advertising became a multibillion

industry that blew out of proportions. Jean Kilbourne wrote: “We are each exposed to over 1500

ads a day…” (Kilbourne, 121) That was written roughly twenty years ago and things have not

become better. Advertisement became dangerous, especially to women, for various reasons.

The idea of a “flawless woman” has become very prominent over the past years.

According to media, for a girl to be beautiful, she needs to be slender and skinny, have light skin

color, not a blemish on her skin, and etc. This idea was branded into our minds by everyday

exposure to the massive amounts of suggestive images, a lot of which come from advertisements

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that can be found everywhere. We can see “flawless” models in magazines, on billboards, in

subways, on buses, on TV, and on the internet. However, what a lot of people do not realize is

the fact that none of these images are real. In our day and age everything is modified and

enhanced to an accepted standard. When we see a celebrity on a poster, we see an idealistic

representation of this person, because prior to printing, the photo was worked on by a specialist.

If the person has more body fat than what is deemed ideal or beautiful, than it is “corrected”

digitally via computer software, for example via Photoshop. Everything can be changed: locks of 

hair added, hair made look matte or shiny, eyes gaining a deeper color and a twinkle, skin made

look clear and have no pores, women can have their breasts made look bigger, men can appear

more muscular, and so on. Throughout recent years, the use of computer software to digitally

enhance an image or a video has become deeply engrained in media production and

advertisement.

Adobe Photoshop is one the most popular softwares that is used to alter and “enhance”

the images. It is an easy to use, hard to master computer program that does huge amounts of 

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potential damage every day. What is usually used for entertainment purposes by general

population, on professional level creates an impossible ideal for women to compare to. In

“Killing Us Softly 4”, Jean Kilbourne states that women try to achieve the ideal that is given to

us by advertisements, which happens to be in vain since no woman can look like it. One of the

more striking examples from this movie is the fact that sometimes on the picture we see body

parts of several different women put together to create the perfect model. The basic tool used for

this kind of image construction is layers. The image is divided and subdivided into a layer for

each part of the body that is worked on, thus inadvertently deconstructing a woman and making

her less of a human and more of a collage of body parts.

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Another basic tool that contributes to the damaging side of advertisements is a crop tool.

Seemingly innocent tool is at the core of female body objectification. With it, we can take a

person in a picture and make her just a torso that displays a product. In a matter of seconds even

the most amateur users can take away a personality by selecting a field that includes only certain

body parts. Very often ads show just body parts to emphasize a product: an eye on a billboard to

emphasize mascara, legs taking up the whole page of a magazine to sell stockings, disembodied

flowing hair to sell hair products, and so on. A more sophisticated operation of a crop tool with

the help of several others allows professionals to create an otherwise inanimate object out of a

collection of body parts. It sounds like a work of a twisted butcher, and in some ways it is. A

continuous bombardment with representations of perfect stand-alone body parts leads us to seek 

these qualities when confronted with a person in real life; we instantaneously divide a person in

our mind into those regions that are shown in the ads and compare them. It is a damaging aspect

in many ways, with the most dramatic being that body becomes so important that personalities

are often overlooked.

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Another big part of the digital enhancement group of software are the various 3D

computer graphics software and editing programs like Adobe After Effects. Many of the things

that can be done to a still image can be done to a movie or a video clip as well and in some ways

even better. Computer-generated imagery or simply CGI grants us unlimited possibilities in the

area of digital enhancement, and all you need is some green cloth. One interesting example of the

use of CGI to alter human body is from relatively recent movie called Change-Up. During a nude

scene in this movie, Olivia Wilde’s breasts are made with the use of CGI. While it is

advantageous to celebrities who wish to have privacy of their body, it goes to show how

powerful these tools are. It also raises a question of why she chose to hide her body: is it simply

because she wanted to or was she ashamed or self-conscious of it.

Low self-esteem is one of the biggest issues created by advertisements that use digital

enhancement software. A study published by Springer Science + Business Media on self-esteem

and body esteem showed that advertisements, in this case of scarcely dressed models, lower self-

esteem in both men and women. Women are affected roughly 2.5 times more. Taking into

account the fact that all advertisements are digitally modified to look “better”, it is only logical to

assume that as a result of the use of altered images, ads and commercials constantly take our self-

esteem down a notch. Another study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology produced

to some extent similar results. It showed that advertisements also produce increased negative

mood and body dissatisfaction in women, which in their turn lower self-esteem.

Body dissatisfaction is furthermore an issue on its

own. Impossibly thin images of models and celebrities

created by retouching designers encourage girls and

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women to strive to become ideal, often developing eating disorders in the process. Anorexia

nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder are the most common eating disorders that

can be tied to the influence of advertising. By using computer software to slim down the models,

advertisement agencies indirectly cause physical harm to women, mainly in the Western

societies.

And lastly female body objectification is a concerning problem. Kilbourne states:

“…turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence

against the person.” It is impossible to disagree with this statement. Throughout the history, the

oppressed people were seen as less than a human and were treated poorly everywhere. Therefore

by objectifying women in the advertisements, advertisement agencies to an extent lower women

to that status of being less. Both Kilbourne and Jacobson and Mazur come to a conclusion that

objectifying creates violence, since women are not seen as human beings but rather as objects,

and therefore violence seems to be acceptable.

An interesting twist to all of this can be seen in the interviews with the retouching

designers. In the trailer for a documentary “Wet Dreams and False Images”, the specialist makes

a point of saying that digital enhancement is an issue and acknowledges that it has done damage.

In an interview for Graphics.com, a master photo retoucher states that he shares his knowledge

on the topic of his job with everybody he knows, however they still prefer the images that were

worked on. Thus we can find ourselves asking even more questions: do people strive towards

beauty and ideals regardless of how harmful they can be, and is it really the fault of the immense

progress the world has achieved in the recent history or there are more underlying causes? For

now we are left to struggle with situation we find ourselves in, and hope that further progress

will improve current condition.

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List of Sources

Anne Wright. “Sexualising girls lifts glass ceiling.” Herald Sun (Australia). July 1, 2008.

NEWS; Pg. 15.

Dens, Nathalie, Patrick Pelsmacker, and Wim Janssens. "Effects of Scarcely Dressed Models in

Advertising on Body Esteem for Belgian Men and Women." Sex Roles 60.5/6 (2009): 366-378.

 Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web

Tiggemann, Marika, and Belinda Mcgill. "The Role Of Social Comparison In The Effect Of 

Magazine Advertisements On Women's Mood And Body Dissatisfaction." Journal of Social &

Clinical Psychology 23.1 (2004): 23-44. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web

Jacobson, M.F., & Mazur, L.A. (1995). Sexism and Sexuality in Advertising. In M.F. Jacobson

and L.A. Mazur (Eds.), Marketing madness: A survival guide for a consumer society, (pp. 74-

87). Boulder, CO: Westview Press

Killing Us Softly 4. Dir. Sut Jhally. Perf. Jean Killbourne. Media Education Foundation. DVD.

2010

Abduzeedo. “The Perfect Lie in Photoshop.” August 06, 2009. Abduzeedo Blog. Web.

http://abduzeedo.com/perfect-lie-photoshop

Wet Dreams and False Images. Dir. Jesse Epstein. New Day Digital. 2004

http://www.newdaydigital.com/Wet-Dreams-and-False-Images.html

Dilg, Brian. Personal Interview. June 16, 2005.

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