Killing us softly response

I've seen the first of the Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly series for one of my classes, but not this updated version, and it shows how the objectification of women in the media has only intensified and gotten worse. The most interesting part of the two-part video is the discussion of the way women's bodies are portrayed in parts, not as a whole, in order to objectify them. This process, often called fragmentation, is used often in advertising: we don't see a woman's whole body. We often see just her hands, her face, her legs, her feet, and so on, and this is the first step in not seeing a woman as a whole human being, but merely an object. In fact, Kilbourne says that the impact of portraying women as objects and the pervasiveness of this portrayal indirectly leads to violence and dehumanization of women. She says in the video, "turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person." One of the more disturbing examples Kilbourne mentions is the woman is transformed into a Heineken keg robot, which she describes as a "frat boy's dream," but the connotations are frightening. Advertising is done and arrived at with the utmost thought and psychological evaluation of the masses, and the idea that a woman being turned into a keg robot makes men want to buy Heineken is downright disturbing. Despite being the most obvious example, there are thousands of instances in which women's bodies in the media are fragmented, or as Kilbourne says, "dismembered."