Advertisements Dehumanize Women

Jean Kilbourne used many different strategies to help deliver her persuasive speech on advertising. She used effective and startling statistics, pictures, video clips, and humor to show the negative influence advertising on women.
The presentation was logically organized utilizing diction, straightforward syntax, and memorable arguments. There were no run-on sentences or parts of the speech that were difficult to understand. Jean spoke very clearly and fluctuated her tone to emphasize certain arguments. Each point was backed up effectively by verbal as well as visual evidence. The speech itself logically progressed from the beginning by simply showing the rise in advertising costs to the more effective arguments of how advertising has dehumanized women, created an unobtainable ideal which has helped increase eating disorders, and has even gone as far as to glamorize battering.
However, to make her points effective, Jean used visual arguments. Her bar graph in the beginning gave a visual representation where numbers fail audibly. After which, she simply used advertising against itself to argue her point. She showed how women are dehumanized through video clips and pictures how most of the time the focus of the advertisement is a women’s body or part of a women’s body. Sickly skinny women were also presented to show her point that women desire to look like these models, because simply saying that women are skinny would not have been as effective. She then used ads that portrayed beaten and battered women in a glamorous way to show how truly negative the advertising of women has become.
Jean’s delivery of the speech was just as effective as were the visuals involved. She had dressed professionally, while not too much to distract her audience. As I had mentioned before, she fluctuated her tone to emphasize certain points in her arguments, and also spoke fluidly. She maintained eye contact throughout the presentation and by doing so showed how well she knew the subject of her speech. The presentation of her arguments was as essential to persuading her audience as was the arguments themselves.
I thought that the last points Jean made on the glamorization of battering were most effective. I had always seen the dehumanizing of women, but had never seen advertising that had glamorized abuse. This really pointed out to me just how far the dehumanizing of women in advertising has undergone. The pictures startled me, and made me feel sympathetic to the victims of such horrible advertisements.
Overall, the presentation I felt was very effective. Jean made very effective and convincing arguments as well as statistics to defend the points she made. However, it seemed as though she were only addressing women. Although she called on everyone to help the cause in the end, her presentation seemed very much toward the female audience. It would have been more appealing to a male audience if she had even mentioned men in advertising as well. Also, she did not present any actions to undertake in the end of her presentation to stop negative advertising. I felt that advertising was bad, but then I did not know what to do help fight against the dehumanization in advertising. Aside from these points, I felt the speech was tremendously effective and well-delivered.