Another Highly Anticipated Book was a Flop, but This Time it Made Me Angry

I was so excited to read Jean Kilbourne’s Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising. She produced “Killing Us Softly” in 1979, a short documentary about the power of advertising and the gendered assumptions and influences therein.* Instead, it was another very promising thing that turned out to be a great big flop. An even bigger flop than Winkler’s The Politics of Propaganda. Winkler was more helpful than Kilbourne turned out to be. Winkler’s book was a well-crafted historical monograph, and the reason it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped is because my dissertation is going somewhere else. Deadly Persuasion isn’t even that.

I confess, I found this book very difficult to read, which is surprising, because the prose is engaging and conversational. However. However. Kilbourne stated from the beginning the book would be more about addiction than advertising, more about how advertisers push their audience’s buttons and guide them toward types of products and specific brands. In fact, the book is about Kilbourne’s addiction and recovery process. Writing a book about one’s own journey through addiction and recovery is a good and noble thing – when that’s what you tell your reader you’re doing. Don’t write that book and then tell me it’s a deconstruction of advertising tropes using gendered and historical lenses. Because I will be ANGRY at you for that bait and switch.

I am not judging her for this choice, I’m really not. But that is the kind of book I need to be prepared to read. I often opt out of those books when I have the choice. I opted to keep pushing through the book in the hopes that it would become what she’d promised, though, and that’s what made me angry. I could have just passed on this as a memoir more than anything – a memoir of growing up female in the 1950s and 1960s, early and multiple addictions, learning how her addictions were fed by the larger culture around her, and eventually learning to counter the messages. If that was what I needed to read for my dissertation, I would have done so happily. It wasn’t, and I didn’t.

She doesn’t just talk about her addictions, alcoholism and nicotine. But she relates everything back to her personal experience. When she brought up the use of sex in the advertisements, it was a great opportunity to discuss how those images interacted with the culture at large. Instead, Kilbourne started there and very quickly, if not immediately, moved to her own story.  The result is that the multiple levels and ways the advertisements interacted with broader culture and the many subcultures were glossed over or outright ignored.  The intense focus on her own experience disguised as a scholarly dissection of the issues read as an insidious kind of White Feminism ™: the kind that doesn’t even realize that there are other oppressions that intersect with gendered oppressions. The kind that focuses on the problems of upper middle class white women, and ignores the problems facing working class women, women of color, disabled women, queer women – and women with more than one of those identities.** I can’t say one way or the other what her politics really are, but the intense naval gazing and self-involved focus not only damaged her argument, it damaged her credibility.

*I don’t believe “Killing Us Softly” is available online, but it is referenced in “Miss Representation”, which is available without a Netflix membership here.

**I recommend Flavia Dzodan’s blog post “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit” for a powerful explanation of why intersectionality is so necessary…and, well, in general, really.