Deadly Persuasion

Kilbourne, Jean. Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight The Addictive Power of Advertising. New York: The Free Press, 1999.

The reason why I picked Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising is because it looked very interesting compared to the other two books I had also chosen. One book had to deal with TV living and the other book had to deal with detecting lies and deceit but when I ran across a book that was mainly focused on women and advertising, I was completely for it. I thought out of all the books that I have chosen I would be more interested in how the author, Jean Kilbourne approached different aspects of women and advertising. I also chose this book, because I felt like I was not influenced by advertisements but then after reading a few chapters of the book, I realized that advertising affects a lot of people and people do things in life because of what they see on television, billboards, movies, etc. I also thought it was interesting to learn how advertising truly affects women when it comes to cars, food, clothing, etc. It's just interesting to see the different advertisements that Jean Kilbourne presents throughout the book and see the different meanings to the advertisements and see why people react the way that they do to the different ads.

Jean Kilbourne has a lot of different publications. One of her publications is a book called Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. Besides publishing books, Jean Kilbourne also has a series of films and videos. Her first film, Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women and the remakes Still Killing Us Softly and Killing Us Softly 3 are amongst some of the most popular educational films of all times. Some of her other videos include: Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies and Alcohol, Slim Hopes: Advertising and the Obsession with Thinness and Pack of Lies: The Advertising of Tobacco. She has also been the host of several videos and has also lectured to over 1,000 colleges and universities.

When it comes to research, Jean Kilbourne had done her fair share. She has done research on how advertising affects women and girls when it comes to alcohol, sex, food, cars, clothing, tobacco, violence, and rebellion. One example would be the completion of the book, Deadly Persuasion and another example would be the video Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women and also the video, Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies and Alcohol. These two videos show substantial information about all the different research that she has done to find out the answers to the questions.

Jean Kilbourne's book relates to Persuasion in many ways. Persuasion is a form of social influence that occurs between people and affects behavior. This book relates to Persuasion because throughout the book, Kilbourne talks about how advertisements affect women and girls even though they might not think it does. Kilbourne reveals throughout the book, that "advertising encourages us not only to objectify each other but to also feel that our most significant relationships are with the products that we buy (27)." Kilbourne believes that advertisements corrupt relationships and then offers us products that we long for and need.

Part II Summary of the book

Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight The Addictive Power of Advertising is a book about women and advertising. Throughout this book, Jane Kilbourne reveals how deeply advertisers insinuate themselves into our daily lives. What Jean Kilbourne basically keeps us aware of throughout this book is that advertisers do far more than influence our taste; Advertisers manipulate our desires so that the products that we purchase will become our closest friends. In the introduction, Kilbourne talks about her life as a young child and the many different things she has experienced in life. After seeing an ad that changed her life in 1968, she realized that advertisements demeaned women and it was then that she realized that she wanted to focus on advertising and women. One of the main points throughout the book that Kilbourne makes clear is that advertising does influence people and their actions and this is one of the reasons why television and magazines, primarily any time of media, engage in many different forms of competition to convince different organizations to place their advertisements on different publications so that consumers can see what is out there and maybe even buy it if the ad is portraying what needs to be sold.

Jean Kilbourne also throughout her book talks about how the different images on the ads really do not relate to what is being advertised. Many of the different ads have these catchy phrases and statements written somewhere on the ad that has nothing to do with the ad at all. She went on to say that a shoe ad might show a pair of shoes on a person but will actually make the consumer think that the focus of the ad is on the relationship of the child and not the pair of Timberland books. Or, an ad that had "Life's precious gifts" on it, the reader might thing that life's precious gift is a warming relationship with someone else because that is what the ad is portraying. But if the reader looks at the bottom print, of the page, they realize that the ad has to deal with Silver Crystal knick-knacks (76). The bottom line that she is saying is that ads have promised us to a better relationship with a product and that if we buy a certain product, the consumer will be loved but to an extent, things have changed and the slogan went to, " buy this and it will love you(81)."

Another thing she also wrote about is advertising and food. She said that women have always been closely linked to food and that now food has become intertwined with love. Food has been advertised as a way for men and women to demonstrate their love and to insure its requital. What she is saying is that people place relationships on food. She feels that people think that a way to win a person's heart is with what you make in the kitchen. Also, Kilbourne noticed that a lot of the ads have a lot more women than men and they women in these ads are featured as feeding themselves and not the man, like most of the male ads feature. She said that these ads feature a lot more women than men because after a psychological research was done, the results came out that women use food to deal with their loneliness and disappointment and also in a way to connect. When things do not go a certain why, it is assumed that women eat the pain away.

Besides dealing with food, Kilbourne also dealt with religion and advertising. What she had to say with this is now advertisements are bringing religion into their ads and displaying that products will