Kill Us Softly and Tough Guise

On the video Killing Us Softly 3 and Tough Guise, we saw what the media and society in the United States and in other parts of the world is demonstrating as to how men and women should be. The advertisement of products using women shown on Jean Kilbourne’s video was degrading and sometimes even ridiculous. Such as putting women in passive and dangerous situations and explicitly saying that it’s okay for them to act as child or innocent or naïve so that men could take advantage of them. Another thing about women’s ads was that women’s goal is to have the perfect body or aim to be perfect beauty and that frustrates women because no one can be like that.  All of this is created to keep patriarchy alive. And the other part of this scheme is showing men that they have to be strong, show no emotion, muscular, be violent, and put other people down to feel good about themselves.

We also have to take into account the race and class factor. Most ads showing women are of white female, with expensive jewelry or expensive clothes, and that affects the other types of races and lower classes that know that they can’t get what the media wants them to be or have. And lastly we have to notice that capitalism plays a big role on the oppression of the poor or the other races. Capitalism tells them to buy more stuff and that way they can get closer to perfection, which deludes their hope for acceptance in society.

This video is somewhat recent and I think is a different spin on the same heterosexual version of it. I think it’s interesting but I’ve never seen it anywhere. I think this video was only showed on TV that targets the gay audience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB90Vkyqrts&feature=related