Virtuality v. Reality
A friend of mine posted on Facebook a short video on ideas of feminine beauty in advertising.
i didn’t link to it because if i had known prior to watching the video about some of the ads which were featured, i probably would not have watched it myself.
The woman making the presentation, however, is Jean Kilbourne, a woman who has — essentially —made her life’s work about exposing the ways women are portrayed in advertising.
They are, in short, made to be sexual objects. That, in and of itself is not new to most of us.
And Kilbourne does not, in the video i watched anyway, make any comments about pornography.
But in the video i watched, it was unmistakeable that sexuality was the dominant theme. And the link then to pornography is natural. We sexualize women in our culture.
It’s cruel to the women, because it’s counterfeit beauty; an unattainable standard. And it’s damaging to men because we come to expect all women to be centerfolds.
Virtuality v. Reality. This is our world.
Even the models themselves don’t — in real life — look like the images of themselves which are the final product of the advertisers. Cindy Crawford is quoted as saying she wished she looked like Cindy Crawford.
We are killing women and men in our society by promoting a standard of beauty that doesn’t exist.
Advertising tells us lies about women: that they are sexual objects to be treated as property; they all must be flawless; and they exist to please us.
And porn addicts can tell you that the more we are shaped by what is false, the more we lose touch with what is real.
Intentional Warriors 
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