Cover Work 12.12.08

Gender in advertising

Gunter
-Women in magazine adverts prior to 1970’s rarely shown to be in paid work, & when they were, it was stereotypical roles (secretary/hairdresser)

-Number of “housewife” images declined after 1950’s BUT image was common in 1960 & 1970’s

-Advertising on TV in early 1970’s was stereotyping all ads featuring women; three quarters were kitchen and bathroom products.

-Similarities in gender representations from country to country, and sexism in adverts aimed at children

Cumberbatch

-Advertisers became wary of showing women doing housework (seen in 7% of adverts)

Scheibe

-Women found to be more concerned about beauty/cleanliness/family and pleasing others

-Men achievements and having fun.

Macdonald

-Advertisers generally lagged behind women’s magazines in the cultivation of new models of address, even when the evidence suggested that commercial advantaged could be gained from modernising their approach.

-Fait adverts – “When I’m not lying on car I’m a brain surgeon”

Gender in Contemporary advertising

Women and men are usually equal

1998 study found over 750 prime-time TV ads from 1998 found women were twice as likely as men to be in commercials for domestic products – Bartsch et al.

Macdonald

-Summarises changed from late 1980’s-1990’s: Believing both feminism’s battle had been won, and its ideology was now harmless by virtue of being out of date, advertisers invented “post feminism” as a utopia where women could do whatever the pleased, provided they had sufficient will and enthusiasm.

Greer

-Selling Beauty – She is a failure is she is not beautiful
UK beauty industry takes £8.9 billion a year out of women’s pockets.
They teach little girls that they need make-up and train them to use it.

-Reminds us that situation is unchanged till today.

-Since she wrote “The Female Eunch” (1960’s) – “Women who were unselfconscious and unmade up thirty years ago” are now “infected” with the need to conform to certain images of beauty.

-30 years ago it was enough to look beautiful; now a woman has to have a tight toned body, including her buttocks and thighs, so that she is good to touch, all over

Walter

-1998 – today’s women more or less happy with how they look, where as men felt unsatisfied with their own appearance “If only 4% of men think they are attractive, we should not be too quick to argue that only women feel cast down by pressures of beautiful ideals”

-A feminist but refuses to see fashion and beauty advertising as a conspiracy to keep women down.

Cortese

-“Ad deconstruction reveals a pattern of symbolic and institutionalised sexism”

-Female prototype displays youth/good looks/sexual seductiveness/perfection

-Analysis in men in advertising – reveals men often shown as the “perfect provocateur”

-Today’s man has pumped his Pecs and shoulders and exhibits well defined abs… not many years a, the slick and refined look defined fashion’s ideal man. Now the muscular guy dominates the runways and magazine pages.

The representation of women in commercials

“Hi we’d like a large thin crust pizza”

“That’s Ok I’ll clean up”

Cleaners

Housewife

Repair shop – Women can’t take on men’s roles

Exploitation of women in ads

Jean Kilbourne – “We are exposed to over 2,000 ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful educational force in society”

“Turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step in justifying violence against that person”

Bodies only

Bugle Boy – “In an extremely competitive environment, you kind of go back to T&A

Sex objects

Dehumanization

Lazier-Smith, Furham & Bitar - “We often find no representational connections in contemporary advertising. One of the common registers of print advertising is of the naked or sexually-posed woman selling a product”

Stereotypical roles

STOP THE EXPLOITATON OF WOMEN IN ADVERTISEMENTS!