Jean Kilbourne (born January 4, 1943) is an American educator, former model, filmmaker, author and activist, who is known as a pioneer of feminist advertising criticism and advocacy of media literacy.
[1][6] In 1968, Kilbourne saw an ad for Ovulen 21, a birth control pill, which said it worked "the way a woman thinks—by weekdays" instead of by their menstrual cycles with pictures of various stereotypical tasks for a housewife.
[10] Early in her scholarly career, Kilbourne explored the connection between advertising and several public health issues, including violence against women, eating disorders, and addiction, and launched a movement to promote media literacy as a way to prevent these problems.
Kilbourne said that the advertising perpetuates unrealistic, unobtainable ideals and creates a culture of violence toward women in which they are objectified and dehumanized.
[8] Her 2000 book, Can’t Buy My Love, was recognized with a Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology.
[15] In 2019, 40 years after the release of her documentary Killing Us Softly, Jennifer Pozner, the director of the organization Women in Media & News, said, "Kilbourne’s main point—that advertising creates a toxic cultural environment in which sexual objectification, physical subjugation and intellectual trivialization of women has deep psychological and political resonance—is more compelling than ever.
[16] In the 2006 article "Market Feminism: The Case for a Paradigm Shift" by Linda M. Scott, Still Killing Us Softly from 1987 was criticized as being a near duplicate film from the 1979 original.
[17] A 2012 paper calling for change in teaching materials within Women's Studies to include androgynous body types and transgender women criticized Kilborne's work stating "by neglecting to acknowledge or critique dominant couplings of bodies and genders, Kilbourne is able to neatly flip the terms of the binary she sets up," and that "the absence of this critique is connected to her failure to interrogate the ways in which the category of women is constructed in conjunction with a host of other identity categories" such as race.