Advertising

Advertising is the act of drawing the attention of the public to a specific product or service. By employing methods of persuasion, advertisers endeavor to convince members of that public to purchase or otherwise acquire a product or service. In the United States and throughout the West at the beginning of the 21st century, advertising is pervasive—everywhere and incessant.

Gender-specific advertising involves creating persuasive messages expressly for men or women. Along with encouraging the acquisition of a concrete product or service, gender-specific advertising “sells” a social identity, albeit a largely abstract one. Frequently, the target of such an advertisement is asked to consider the ways in which purchasing a certain product fixes a problem. Gender-specific advertising also targets other demographic indicators within the larger categories of masculinity and femininity, including age, sexuality, socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity. Despite the myriad ways in which these categories can be combined to target a specific social group—through an unprecedented variety of television networks and programs, magazines, Websites, radio stations, and other forms of mediated entertainment—most advertisements are still created to attract the majority of a targeted audience. As a result, masculine product advertisements are directed at men and feminine product advertisements are directed at women.

Cultural critics of gender-specific advertising call attention to how this kind of advertising perpetuates stereotypes, sexism, and objectification. From a feminist lens, gender-specific advertising represents evidence of how hegemonic portrayals of masculinity and femininity, misogyny, and homophobia are communicated and reproduced in media.

Drawing from feminist theory, several binaries surface in relationship to how women and men are depicted in advertisements, including active/passive, mind/body, and public/private. For example, researchers have demonstrated how men are overrepresented in advertising with a far larger range of options for their active, public participation (whether at work or, for automobile ads in particular, on the open road), whereas women are most frequently depicted in passive roles, often in the home. As John Berger asserts in Ways of Seeing, “men act, and women appear.” Women are more likely to be depicted as inert and sexualized objects.

Gender-specific advertising reinforces traditional stereotypes of boys and girls, young adult men and women, and middle-aged men and women, as well as the elderly. Researchers have pointed out that in children's toy advertising boys are far more likely to be playing with a toy, whereas girls are more likely merely to be posing beside it. Furthermore, toy advertisements are far more likely to show boys rather than girls playing outdoors with their toys.

Stereotypes of men and women in gender-specific advertising include both positive and negative attributes. Beer commercials, in particular, frequently portray men as klutzy and/or combative while inevitably winning the interest of an easily duped woman, who succumbs to trickery. Meanwhile, in automobile ads, men frequently appear heroic, if not [Page 2]mythic, in their ability to maneuver a sport utility vehicle to the top of a mountain. Women, on the other hand, when they do appear in car ads, appear mainly as competent moms who choose the “right” family vehicle to help them successfully manage their broods. Rarely is a woman featured in a car ad in which her primary goal as a consumer is escape and solitude.

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