Jean Kilbourne Personal Statement

I was like many of the people Jean Kilbourne encountered, who felt personally exempt from the influences of advertising and would say to her “I don’t pay attention to ads. I tune them out. They have no effect on me.” However, it really made me think when Kilbourne said, “girls tend to feel fine about themselves at 8, 9, 10 years old but hit adolescence and they hit a wall.” The 8, 9, 10 year old me would never imagined myself to be the way I am today. I’ve certainly hit this wall that is “this terrible emphasis on physical perfection” with the efforts I make to strive for whatever image of ‘perfection’ that I only define by what I see in advertisements.

While I am certainly in the cohort of girls who “learn early on that they’re going to be judged first and foremost by how they look,” it was never a subliminal message I received from advertisements. My mother had always placed a great emphasis on my appearances, in a way that she never bothered with my brother. While her daughter should be smart and hardworking, but she should also be “perfectly groomed and polished, plucked and shaved” and not at all deviating from what my mother thinks society expects of a

But I listened to everything South Korean advertisements had to say about beauty anyways. It told me that beauty youth and without wrinkles so I buy the anti-aging and skin-tightening moisturizer. It tells me that fair skin makes you look even younger so I buy whatever with the word ‘whitening’ in it. It tells me that a ‘V-line’ chin is desirable so worked out to slim down from the baby fat in my face. Instead of breast implants, I went to Seoul got a new nose for my graduation present. However, that probably had more to do with the encouragement from my mom, who had this habit of pinching my nose before telling me how I would be prettier if my nose bridge was just a bit