The dangerous ways ads see women | Jean Kilbourne

This blog post consists in notes taken from the TEDx talk that might be helpful in the future for the essay.

Many people say they don't pay attention to adverts, but they wear Abercrombie shirts.

Old women are only considered attracted if they look impossibly young.

Brad Pitt/Linda Evangelista 2012 in a channel advert. he looks like a human being, she looks like a cartoon.

Men are usually made bigger. Andy Roddick in Men's Fitness. Once he saw the image he suggested to return those arms to the person they belonged to.

Ralph Lauren showing models with a head bigger than the pelvis, something anatomically impossible.

Real women measure themselves against these ideals every single day. This affects self-esteem and also how men feel about the very real women in their lives.

Women's bodies are dismembered in ads for all kinds of products (syntha-6, visa -it's your life, how do you want to spend it?) and insulted, like dep hair products. This ad was shown in teen magazines, and they are saying to 12 year old women "your breast will never be ok".

When it happened with men, 20 years ago in a Vanity Fair cover, one of the first examples on turning men into sex objects. It's not the same with men and with women though, it would be the same if like the ad before it'd say something like "your penis may be too small, too limp, too droopy, etc... but at least you can have a pair of jeans".

There are examples of harm men in ads but it's less related with the body. Men are being objectified as well, but they don't live in a world where they can be harassed, rapedand beaten... at least white straight men, while most of women do.

When women are objectified there is always a threat of sexual violence. They lie passive, vulnerable and submissive, very different from body language of men. This can be proved when men are in the some position as women, it becomes trivialising and absurd.

Grown women are infantilised in ads and increasingly,little girls are sexualised. It's possible to buy high heels for babys now. Boys have been also sexualised, but in a different way, they are encouraged to look at girls as sex objects, encouraged to be sexually precocious and learned to be tough and invulnerable.

United States is one of a few developed countries that doesn't teach sexual education in school, but they do it through adverts. The problem isn't sex, is the pornographic attitude towards sex that leads to a trivialisation of sex. In ads sex is constantly trivialised to sex everything.

The normalisation of porn in our society through internet has led to a regular use of a pornographic language that has become mainstream.

Girls are taught to behave like this and be available without expecting nothing in return. Girls exposed to sexualised images from a young age are more prone to eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem. Advertisement usually trivialises things like sexual assault or muder.

The truth is most men are not violent, so these adverts not only set how women should behave, but men too. It is a way of normalising dangerous attitudes creating a climate where women's are mere objects. Turning a human being into a thing is the first step towards justifying violence against that person.