Cigarette | Killing Us Internally

Hello, World.

       In 1979, Jean Kilbourne released her first of a series of documentaries attacking media, the industry, and its affect on women's lives. Since then, she has produced an additional three documentaries, about once a decade, noticing change, improvement and worsening of the significant impact that the media plays on women's health and life. She titled them all variations of the phrase: Killing Us Softly, which I thought was interesting. In my opinion, there is no clear or obvious meaning; the title doesn't shout out a message (in fact, quite the opposite). How can a title containing the word 'softly' shout out a meaning? 

       Now you are most likely thinking, OK, I get it, why do you care so much about the title? Well, in understanding Kilbourne's title, it is possible to conceive a summary and overall conclusion of all of her points (including sex appeal, domination, food, etc.) in a one-sentence goal: 

The modern day media's consistently produces films and images of women to enforce and impose certain societal views towards them, ultimately affecting how men treat women and how women treat themselves; whenever a message is conveyed, it is achieved through our subconscious. 

The fact that this is achieved through our subconscious, is extremely important, and accounts for the "Softly", within the title. An advertisement company's chief was actually quoted in this documentary saying that only about 6-10% of an advertisements message is received through the eye and that roughly 90% of all information is directly received by our subconscious. This is extremely powerful and dangerous, because, since most of the information processed by our brains heads straight to our subconscious, even the most disturbing, harmful and scarily effective messages are believed and accepted within our mind without us even realising it. Kilbourne said that a lot of people have told her that "Advertisements don't affect me, I just censor them out". Clearly, you can't. Most of us are vulnerable to a cornucopia of information that we have not even realised we processed.
       Since the media and the industry, especially more recently have been negatively affecting women's lives, as discussed in the documentary. Therefore, the societal views of women, as portrayed by the media, is killing us...softly.
       However, in my opinion, I think it is noteworthy to expose the exponential growth of the media's influence on society. Only starting in the 50s, pop culture has been increasingly influential, and with the introduction of the Internet in 90s along with the widespread availability of TVs, media has severely and increasingly impacted our lives. The media is a corrupt, invading motor of the cause of many problems in female culture such as: attitudes, inequality, domestic violence, eating disorders, and extensive cosmetic surgery. I think that this overwhelming and frightening growth and impact can no longer be described as 'soft', but rather as internally.
       We as humans, especially women, have become victims of the society we created. Therefore, our new definition is as follows:

The modern day media's consistently produces films and images of women to enforce and impose certain societal views towards them, ultimately affecting how men treat women and how women treat themselves; the industry's impact is constantly growing and increasingly powerful not only making us more vulnerable to subconsciously delivered information, but similar to the cigarette, is killing us internally.

Goodbye, World.