Advertising

Masculinity and the Rise of Modern Advertising

Advertising emerged as an important cultural phenomenon near the end of the nineteenth century. Before that time, ads were often mistrusted, since they were used to hock unnecessary products of questionable repute. Advertisements also [Page 11]began to look different, relying on words, which were considered more informative than visual images. By the early twentieth century, massive economic and social changes, including the centralization of production and the development of national markets, generated a consumer economy in which producers sought national publicity through advertising. This consumer-based economy spawned the modern advertising industry as structural changes in the nature of work, including shorter working hours, increased leisure time, and higher wages, gave men spending money and time to spend it on the new products rolling off assembly lines. Advertising now served an important social function: inform people about, and stimulating their desire for, these products. With new print technologies and rural free delivery enabling them to expand their readership, newspapers and periodicals increasingly included advertising as a significant source of revenue, selling their audience markets to advertisers.

During the 1920s, advertising agencies sought to reach men by appealing to their aspirations for upward mobility and by drawing heavily on psychology and dominant constructions of middle-class masculinity. Ads used emotional, and often irrational, appeals to men's sexuality, hunger, and safety. They tapped men's insecurity about employment, success, and their bodies and featured images of well-to-do businessmen and professionals in order to encourage personal dissatisfaction (the belief that one was insufficiently masculine) and suggest that consumer products could foster self-improvement. A soap ad, for example, featured a pile of men grasping to reach the top, while Gillette promoted its shaving products by suggesting that men who shaved daily were satisfied and successful. Such ads introduced new and enduring standards of male physical appearance, encouraging men to view themselves as marketable commodities at a time when manliness and success in business were increasingly associated with the cultivation of personality and a winning external appearance—an approach that was replacing the nineteenth century values of community service and inner strength as signs of success.

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