Jean Kilbourne

Education and career Kilbourne has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Wellesley College and holds a Master of Arts and Doctorate in Education from Boston University. She then obtained a job at the BBC working as a secretary. She testified twice before the United States Congress and advised two Surgeons General of the United States on the impact of Joe Camel, a cartoon mascot for Camel brand cigarettes, on children, and other advertising around alcohol and the portrayal of women. Kilbourne said that the advertising perpetuates unrealistic, unobtainable ideals and creates a culture of violence toward women in which they are objectified and dehumanized. Kilbourne believes that addictions are a political tool.

Public reception and impact In the 1970s, Kilbourne's work pioneered the criticism of a growing trend among advertisers to objectify women, now a robust field within feminist criticism of the media. According to The New York Times Magazine and The Boston Globe, she was among the top three most popular guest lecturers on college campuses, speaking at more than half of all universities and colleges in Northern America.

In 2015, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and received the Humanist Heroine Award from the American Humanist Association.

In 2019, 40 years after the release of her documentary Killing Us Softly, Jennifer Pozner, the director of the organization Women in Media & News, said, "Kilbourne’s main point—that advertising creates a toxic cultural environment in which sexual objectification, physical subjugation and intellectual trivialization of women has deep psychological and political resonance—is more compelling than ever."

Criticism In the 2006 article "Market Feminism: The Case for a Paradigm Shift" by Linda M. Scott, Still Killing Us Softly from 1987 was criticized as being a near duplicate film from the 1979 original.

A 2012 paper calling for change in teaching materials within Women's Studies to include androgynous body types and transgender women criticized Kilbourne's work stating "by neglecting to acknowledge or critique dominant couplings of bodies and genders, Kilbourne is able to neatly flip the terms of the binary she sets up," and that "the absence of this critique is connected to her failure to interrogate the ways in which the category of women is constructed in conjunction with a host of other identity categories" such as race.

Documentaries and publications

Filmography Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women (2010) Deadly Persuasion: Advertising & Addiction (2004) Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies, & Alcohol (2004) Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women (2000) The End of Education (with Neil Postman, 1996) Slim Hopes: Advertising & the Obsession with Thinness (1995) Sexual Harassment: Building Awareness on Campus (1995) The Killing Screens: Media and the Culture of Violence (1994) Pack of Lies: The Advertising of Tobacco (1992) Advertising Alcohol: Calling the Shots (2nd Edition) (1991) Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women (1987) Calling the Shots: Advertising Alcohol (1982) Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women (1979)

Publications

Originally published as Deadly Persuasion by Simon & Schuster in 1999, won the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology.

Personal life Kilbourne dated Ringo Starr in the 1960s while she was living in London. She later met poet Thomas Lux while working at Emerson. They married and they had one child before divorcing. Lux died in 2017.