Gender Advertising

The Representation of Women

The earliest forceful critique of the advertising industry as contributing in a major way to the oppression of women came from Betty Friedan, who in the early 1960s set out to investigate what she called “the problem that has no name,” the ennui pervading the lives of many American women in the wake of [Page 637]World War II. For Friedan, one of the main causes of this dissatisfaction was advertising, which, instead of showing women how new labor-saving devices (or even premade pie mix) could give them the free time to become astronomers or astronauts, offered them only the possibility of being better wives and mothers. This critique provided the backbone of feminist attacks on advertising throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when women were fighting for the right to access jobs that had been the traditional preserve of men and seeking equal pay for equal work.

Two further influential critiques of the representation of women in advertising were published in the late 1970s. Erving Goffman used content analysis to demonstrate that the problem was not only sex-role stereotyping but also the way in which the composition of ads (for example, the relative size of male and female figures and their relationship to one another) presented women in terms of deference and subordination, and in a manner he described as “childlike.” Judith Williamson turned to semiotics (a technique used to decode the meaning of ads), allied to psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and Marxism, to uncover what she saw as the “root meaning” of a number of ads—concluding once again that ads presented women as limited to the roles of either sex object or domestic drudge. This work was considered important, as research—for example, that carried out in the United Kingdom in 1990 by the Advertising Standards Authority—indicated (as both Friedan and Williamson had argued) that advertising played an important role in establishing unrealistic views of the way women should look and behave.

In recent years, the once-powerful second wave feminism critique has been replaced by a renewed focus on gender difference, popularized by John Gray in a series of books under the generic title Mars and Venus. This focus has been supplemented by a widely held belief that most (if not all) of the goals of feminism have been achieved and that women now live in a “postfeminist” era in which feminism (although rarely going by that name) and femininity are no longer incompatible. In terms of gender and advertising, this has disarmed the critique of advertising that uses highly sexualized images of women—alleging that such images are now produced with a knowing edge, with women exploiting their own sexual power rather than being exploited. Perhaps the best-known example of this type of advertising is the Wonderbra campaign that ran in the mid-1990s. The most famous of these showed the model Eva Herzigova in black lacy underwear looking down at her bra-enhanced cleavage alongside text that read, in huge capital letters, “HELLO BOYS!” Numerous critics have claimed that what made this ad (and others in the same series) different from what had gone before was the multiple ways in which the ad could be read by the viewer. In particular, they argued that the ads convey the possibility that it is up to women to choose to become sexually desirable, thus shifting the location of power from the bearer to the object of the look.

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