[media-credit name=’BEN SMIDT/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]Internationally recognized lecturer and writer Jean Kilbourne spoke passionately to a crowded Union Theater Wednesday night about the influence of advertisements and media on women.

“I don’t think you can grow up in the United States and not be influenced by advertising,” Kilbourne said.

Kilbourne said her aim is to take power away from the advertisers by making the public aware of negative effects advertising has on people of all ages and races. Using multiple advertisements as examples, Kilbourne detailed the image of women in the media.

“Women are seen as things, as objects,” Kilbourne said. “The person is dehumanized and violence becomes inevitable.”

She said thinness has become an obsession for women because models in ads are “painfully and unnaturally thin.” Advertisements have sexualized products and, instead of feeling guilty about being promiscuous, women are made to feel guilty about food, she added.

“The ménage àtrois we’re made to feel guilty about is Ben and Jerry,” Kilbourne said.

Kilbourne urged the audience to transform their attitudes to fight thinness and obesity.

According to Kilbourne, women in Fiji were once praised for putting on weight. However, after the introduction of television in 1995, women’s views of themselves quickly changed. Three years later, 62 percent of Fijian women were dieting, she said.

“Our culture has the power to make women anywhere and everywhere feel absolutely terrible about themselves,” Kilbourne said.

Men are also affected by the unnatural images portrayed in the media, according to Kilbourne. Advertisements attach masculinity to violence and depict communication as a weakness, she said, but stereotypes of men are less personal than depictions of women.

Women often view messages urging them to fix their hair or their breast size, she said, which does not change with age. As men age, culture puts pressure on them to acquire wealth, according to Kilbourne.

“These stereotypes ruin all of us,” Kilbourne said.

According to Kilbourne, the public’s health is being sacrificed for corporate advancement, which is “very dangerous to a democracy.”

Currently 90 percent of all types of information are controlled by six corporations, and, according to Kilbourne, the Bush administration wants to bring this number down to two or three.

Kilbourne also spoke of the importance of sex education in schools because of the early impact advertisements have on children. She said children today are “hypersexualized,” and images in the media are adding to problems of sexual abuse.

“We have to fight to get accurate sex education in our schools,” Kilbourne said.

Kilbourne said the “attitudes and norms” about body image and women need to transform in order to change the current culture. However, she noted this was hard to do in a culture that teaches the public to loathe their bodies.

“It normalizes very dangerous attitudes,” Kilbourne said.

Kilbourne noted although advertising is not solely to blame, the images portrayed in the media add to the problem.