"Killing Us Softly" < > or = Socialization!

For this week’s blog I had to watch a video entitled, “Killing Us Softly”, which is a video of a women who has taken a lot of advertisements that us as people don’t really pay any attention to and has unpacked them to show what they are depicting and how it has shaped our socialization. She starts off by telling you what she was doing before she came across an add that she knew had a subliminal message and how after that she started collecting more adds, pinning tem to her refrigerator, and unpacking them with her friends. When I say unpacking, I mean diving deeper and reading between the lines to unmask the true meaning of the message being advertised in ads.

She goes on to show all these different ads about women and how women are made out to be objects. Besides socialization she also talks about dehumanization and how it is always around us. Another thing she mentions is that men are not as dehumanized as women and when men are being depicted or portrayed in a certain way in an advertisement it is not as harsh as when it is done to women. I agree with a lot of the things that she is saying. She has very good valid points. We are always joking about how sex sells and how the sex industry is growing but we fail to realize that it is always happening around us. She explains this point really well and she makes sense. I enjoyed watching this because I do think that socialization stereotypes are perception of what are dominant norms, values, and beliefs are. She shows a lot of great ads and she does a very good job of relating them to how it dehumanizes women and the U.S. for that matter. For example, one of the ads was a woman advertising a perfume called fetish and she says that the ad is saying that even when a women says no, it is not important what they say because they don’t matter.

This video relates to the chapter on socialization because it helps explain that even though socialization is dynamic in social structure, it has had a static element to it. It talks about some of the agents of socialization like school. The ad about the boy standing tall and acting tough next to the shorter girl smiling innocently definitely relates to school and how it is another major agent of socialization. This video obviously relates to media and how the media is, in my opinion the biggest advocate for dehumanization.

If you are still having some difficulty believing this then here are some pictures that I found of boys and girls being socialized and/or dehumanized.

 This image is a before and after ad for Hydroxycut. It is depicting the stereotype of men who use this product end up looking like what men are suppose to look like by using this little boy.

So this is an for hair dye and this is dehumanizing women and referring to them as animals and it is also showing that the less gray hair you have as a man the more number of women you will be attracted to you.