Blog #18: Summarize today's articles and videos

Wow, today’s class discussion was about body image and YouTube videos. We took a brief break away from MySpace and FaceBook for a day. Most of the students did not watch the videos, so in one of my classes, a student pulled out a laptop, and we watched the videos in class. The funny part about that is while we are studying technology and how it enhances our lives, we don’t have much technology at our college. Ironic isn’t it?

So, the first video assigned was called “Killing Us Softly 3.” The video is about 7 minutes long. Basically, the video is about how advertisements affect people. Apparently, we are exposed to approximately 3 years of advertisements throughout our lives. I guess what this means is if we added up all the advertisements we have watched and put them back to back, it would take 3 years to watch them. This video mostly talks about the power of advertisements and how it affects mostly women and their body images. There were lots of examples of this in the video.

The second video assigned was “Dove Evolution.” This video is about 1 minute long. It starts with a girl who looks normal. I don’t think she has any makeup on and it looks like she probably has only brushed her hair. I mean, she looks clean, but she just looks normal. Then, she nods her head and things begin to happen to her. People start applying makeup to her, and they fix her hair. Then on the screen, a menu pops up and her image is altered tremendously. The screen looks like a Photo Shop screen. The girl’s face is lengthened, she gets a longer neck and her eyebrows are raised. Finally, the video ends by zooming out, and the girl’s transformed face is an advertisement billboard for makeup. This is a video made by Dove. The video concludes with a message typed in white font on a black screen. It says, “No Wonder Our Perception of Beauty is Distorted.” I think the video proves that there is no beauty. What we think of as beauty is simply not real.

Another video we were assigned to watch and discuss was called, “Dove Onslaught.” That’s a wild video. It too is short, about 1 minute long. It starts out with a little girl and the song lyrics playing in the background saying, “Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes.” Then the screen is bombarded by all of these pictures of women in advertisements. The images are all over the place in regard to what item is being advertised, but the women’s images are all in the same category. The images all show women as sexy, focusing on particular parts of their bodies, and making them the ultimate selling machine. There is a particularly disturbing part of the video that is brief but powerful. This is when a girl is in the bathroom and standing on a scale. She goes from fat to skinny back to fat and then to skinny. Then there are these flashes of a girl or woman, different women are pictured, who are having different pieces of their bodies operated on or are dieting or throwing up, or whatever in an effort to be the perfect woman. The video is short, but it is disturbing.