Jean Kilbourne Two Ways A Woman Can Get Hurt Summary

Woman are continually sexualized in the media in attempt to sell products. Jean Kilbourne, author of the essay “Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”, discusses how women are sexually exploited throughout television. Noël Sturgeon, writer of Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural, writes how this vulgar ideology is becoming “natural” in our society. They both conclude that commercials show women being taken advantage of and displayed a passive role while the man has all the power. This propaganda constantly empowers men and boasts the idea that the man should have complete control of a relationship. Advertisement degrade women and portray them as submissive, allowing the man to aggressively control and dominate …show more content…
Neither author touches significantly on the message this concept sends. These advertisements use zoomorphism - the tendency of viewing human behaviour in terms of the behaviour of animals - to sexualize women and place them in a submissive role to objectify females as merely sexual items. A woman's individuality is diminished as she must conform to what the man wants.

The media has bolstered the belief that women are animal-like sexual creatures. The advertisements imply that women want men to be physically aggressive with them. In her book, Sturgeon displays ads complying with this outlook, “When women of color are represented as animals, these associations of aggressive sexuality tend to take an even more negative cast...And a Moschino ad shows a very dark African American woman displayed on a wall like a trophy animal, dressed in leopard