[Applause] when I was a doctoral student at Syracuse University I saw a documentary that completely changed my life I'm not sure how many of you have seen it but it's Jee kilborn's killing us softly so at the time I had a pretty traditional marketing and communication background and I thought I was just going to study similar things moving forward and I saw this documentary and for those of you who don't know it it shows the way women are represented in ad throughout about four decades right and it shows you the stories that are told about women sort of repeatedly that are designed for lack of a better word to sort of keep women in their place in various ways keep them worried about certain types of things the way they look whether they're acceptable to Outsiders gazing upon them things like this so I saw this as a doctoral student and I thought there's no way that I can unsee this ever um so I need to do something about this and this changed my whole plan it changed what I was going to write my dissertation about it changed how I thought about teaching it basically changed everything so I finished this dissertation and I start at Emerson College I'm a first year faculty member I get my course assignments and here you go I'm teaching principles of marketing and I learned very quickly in teaching principles of marketing that the number one thing my young students want to do is be go into advertising become advertisers so now I've got a little bit of a struggle right I say I saw this thing that totally changed my life when I was in my early 30s should I share this with uh some of my students at a much younger age in the hope that this might affect them in the same way so I sort of struggle you're a new professor you've got a lot of things you're balancing in front of the classroom you're kind of nervous you're like maybe I don't show them the most critical perspective in the world on what they intend to do with their lives maybe that isn't a great way to Curry favor with them early on but it works on me and I think but you kind of have a responsibility you've seen this you can't unsee it uh maybe there's a way that you can help some of your students see the same thing in a way that might be helpful to them so you know like any nervous young Professor I create a ridiculous discussion guide just in case nobody wants to talk to me at the end of it right it's entirely possible and uh I show the film you know and I'm I'm sort of assessing the whole time saying are they seeing it are they getting it does this sound like older people wagging a finger at them does it feel relevant to them you know what's happening so we get to the end of of the uh the documentary and I say you know you have this discussion guide and we can uh go with any of the questions on there if you want a starting points but is there anything that really got to you anything that really struck you that you want to talk about right and so slowly people start to talk and and one woman says uh I've always heard that sex sells but I never really thought about what that meant until today and now I'm sort of thinking more about that I'm like great another person says you know these ads are horrifying but they've got to be like the worst ads that have ever been created I mean you know so he can smell your scent as you shake your head no are you serious this is an ad how did this pass this woman must have picked the most horrible ads of all time they can't be representative right so I'm like okay there's more what I thought I was going to get and then a third person speaks and she says I totally took something different from this and I said what's that and she said I sort of thought about what happens when I go out with my friends on on Friday nights and I was well what happens and she said well we all get together and we rip ourselves apart I look disgusting I look gross oh my God what is this hair you know my skin is nasty and we just rip ourselves apart and then we try to re rebuild each other over the course of the next couple of hours so that we can sort of go out with confidence so I said what I always say when I'm taking a little off guard in the classroom because this is quite a revelation I'm happy it's happening but wow there's a lot you can sort of do with this but you know we're operating in real time so I said that's an amazing Insight I'm really happy you had that and I'm really happy that you shared that with us um what do you think you would do with that time if you didn't spend it ripping yourself apart if you didn't spend it having to rebuild your friends as they did the same thing and you know sort of a collective gasp Falls across the room right this is a pretty tough question one that probably many of us couldn't answer ourselves so I try to be forgiving you know and I say let me ask a simpler question like how many girls usually go out with on a on a Friday night she says I don't know 68 something like that how long do you usually take to get ready I don't know I guess we get together at like 8 and then we go out at like 10:30 and I'm like okay so 6 to eight girls times two and a half hours times every Friday night across your college career that's a lot of time right so how how could we be spending that time uh if you weren't sort of adopting an outsider's perspective of yourself and deciding that you didn't live up to it right deep question right so I'm like thank you Jee kilborne this was a great exercise in my principles of marketing class but then I start to ask myself the same questions okay you've been changed by this this documentary your students are responding to it but you also teach up upper level classes you also teach graduate classes what can you do there right hopefully many people will have seen Jee kilborn's killing us Softly by the time they get to Advanced um you know higher education uh so what can you do and I started to say well maybe you could take something you've done and actually build it for the purpose of teaching you know higher order sort of thinking around these topics um at higher levels of instruction so I've been encouraged for a long time to take my dissertation which basically looked at how pop stars are created and popularized through the lens of the people who create and popularize them I worked in the music industry for about 10 years after seeing killing us softly I thought if I applied the same sort of critical lens to the music industry I would find similarly horrifying things if not more horrifying things so that's what I did in my dissertation and several years into teaching at Emerson I decided I was going to sort of update my research you know look at new stars and do new interviews and um and develop these topics into a book and so obviously the book is sort of too long and too complicated to deal with in this setting um but for the purposes of sort of giving you a a pathway into um what I learned and and what I then use in my classes um these interviews with these industry professionals who make and popularize pop stars led me to create this thing called the life cycle of popular music stars and what it says essentially is there are about 12 ways of being if you're female at the top of the music industry and if you can't fit into one of these 12 different types you're not going to get there or you're not going to remain there so without going through all the different types I will give you sort of a flavor for what these types look like one is the good girl this is the Girl Next Door the bring home to Mom type this is where all of them start if they're to have a long career in the industry you know Britney Spear started there Taylor Swift started there Beyonce started there everyone starts there if there to have a career but you can't stay a good girl forever so they transitioned into a phase called temptress this is where sort of sexuality um and sexual availability begin to be more Salient in the way these women are positioned and the songs become about sex the costumes become about sex the narratives about them become about sex um and I joke with my students this is the phase in the pop star's life in which her clothes begins to fall off begin to fall off so from there things get a little more complicated uh we're getting into the midsection of the life cycle so if you're very very very lucky you might be constructed as a diva and that means sort of a best-in-class singer or someone who's a phenomenal musician and this means that maybe just maybe people will talk about your accomplishment rather than your body or the way that you look right someone like Adele is someone who's been in that category recently but people did talk about her looks for about a year before they realize this beautiful voice can come out of a whole different range of body types um but as one of my industry respondents said to me the music industry is like a play and there's only one of those parts at a time in in the music industry so there's only room for sort of one Adele type character at a time um more likely you're slated into a category like hot mess um where your public behavior is covered you know so far and wide that people know more about your bad public Behavior than anything else about you certainly songwriter musician singer no we know what you did in the bar last night um but if you think about what's behind that a lot of times it's really tragic things it's people who are struggling with addiction think about how loud Amy win housee was screaming that they tried to make her go to rehab and she said no no no she won't go go go and she you know ended up battling addiction very seriously and had a very tragic ending Whitney Houston you know very very similar so um the final type that I might mention is the provocator this is somebody who finds our cultural hot buttons and pushes and pushes and pushes and pushes until we get sick of her Lady Gaga so uh basically if you look at what these types have in common they have really nothing to do with expertise or proficiency everything to do with what you look like what you act like how others are are sort of constructing you and they're all places you can't remain forever or for a long period of time so you're forever changing which in brand term sort of destabilizes your brand and makes it very very difficult to have a long run in the public eye so what do I do with this with this sort of knowledge right I take it into my upper level classes entertainment marketing among others and there I want to talk to my students about things that Jean kilborne starts talking about in killing us softly um I want to talk about objectification Theory and I want to talk about self-objectification and I want to talk about the male gaze and I want to talk about encoding and decoding so many things I want to talk about but if I come into my classroom and I say I want to talk about those things my students will totally glaze over forget it if I come into class and I say you guys want to talk about Beyonce cheers Applause literal right and I'm like okay we're in this is a lot better than showing a critical documentary I'm in um so we'll talk about Beyonce and typically what happens is I'll say so what do you think of her what's making respond this way and somebody will say she's Perfection just like that and then someone else will say she's gorgeous and it's always like that it's always that expression but what I find is it's always like a word people are using a word to describe her and the words that you hear mass media using to describe her if I said can you say a little more like could you say a sentence about why you like Beyonce well she's married to Jay-Z and she's the mother of Blue Ivy Carter but there isn't a lot behind why they're saying they love her so then I ask him challenging question I say well what's the source of Beyonce's power like why is she resonating so deeply with you when I say her name that you want to like clap and scream and I hear a student basically Mumble something under his breath and I'm like you know you can say anything in this classroom we've talked about this our ground rule is students speak the way they want to speak and if anything comes out that's problematic or you know upsets anyone we talk about that as a group but I don't want people sort of pre-censorship I say this to the student whispering to another student clearly trying out the idea before taking it sort of public and uh what are the sources of her power and he says the fact that everybody wants to [ __ ] her okay so you know what I do thank you for sharing that perspective right I'm really happy you did that and woo the wheels are turning in my head how do I manage like all the feelings in this room at this time how do I manage my own feelings and I realize he is not wrong right the way that she has been constructed is supposed to make you see her that way and there are many things that make Beyonce amazing many of them related to talent and aptitude and all of these things but the way the music industry sort of packages these stars for for popular consumption he's actually decoding the message in the most you know sort of um standard dominant way that you could and so this also creates an opportunity in the classroom and I say well all right let's talk about about that what does that enable for her Brands what does that enable for her career in what ways does that limit her brand and what ways does that limit her career and my students took me through an amazing analysis of all of that right and we were able to look at representation we were able to look at forms of power what kinds of forms of power we see women having in society or celebrated for in society and what's pretty much invisible to my students who look out there because how can you sort of Imagine different forms of power for yourself if the only ones we celebrate are sort of related to sex in the body and so on so I teach popular culture in my classroom because it gives us access to all of these issues it lets us talk to our students with things that that are really difficult you know in their personal lives to navigate um in a way that sort of interrupts the stories that advertisers and pop culture producers are sort of telling that maybe you know if you sat there and you listen to it you wouldn't accept but maybe if you're sort of half tuned out and you're getting the message from all over the place it's kind of seeping in there right it's making you um think about uh what people are going to think of you on a Friday night rather than you know what you might want to think about what you might want to become who you might want to be right so where does this lead I think teaching popular culture in classrooms at various levels of instruction a lets us have real conversations about real things in a way that sort of meets students where they are rather than asking them to meet us where we are in our Theory Ville Theory land um and just makes the conversation a little bit uh more authentic for both sides involved it also has the effect of training younger generations of of girls and boys to sort of critically analyze the messages that they receive an example is there's a band called kopy Jones I don't know how many of you followed the story but recently they competed in a battle of the bands in Northampton and they came in third place and one of the pieces of advice that an older male coach gave to them or or judge I should say gave to them was that they should play up the sultry in their act to reign in the audience right now these are 14 to 16y old girls a 14 to 16y Old Trio and they said would you say that to a a male performer or a group of boys and they said no it's not the same thing and they said yes it actually is it's completely sexist I can't believe you said that to us and by the way the way you greeted us was girls rock like as though you would assume that we don't like why would we be the sort of magical dancing dog you should assume that we can rock just like you would assume that boys could Rock so these girls take to Facebook and sort of blow this thing up and they start talking about how um how they're children how they're not like of legal age to consent to sex so why should they be putting sex at the beginning of their act why should they be inviting people in inviting arousal they're like don't you understand how messed up that is and for doing this they got covered in Rolling Stone no sorry they got they got covered in billboard they got covered by MTV and a whole bunch of other media Outlets this was so sort of disruptive and new and deviant that they got coverage for it right it's not not often that we see young women get covered for being musicians it's even less likely that we see them covered for basically um taking aim at a critical judge who told them to be more like what we see aspirational Pop Stars being so what you can be doing with your time rather than ripping yourself apart trying to rebuild your friends as they rip themselves apart is learning some skills like these girls developing all kinds of musical expertise learning how to work in a team learning how to tell other people you don't get to say who I am like what if I said I'm fine as I am I'm just going to go out and do the things I want to do be the things I want to be and when people step on my toes I'm going to let them know thank you [Applause]