Misogyny and Sexism in Advertising

[Medusa]

We already had a thread for "Misogyny and Sexism in the News" but I just so a commercial that made me want to start this thread for talking about sexism in ads and marketing.



This is the commercial I saw:




I mean, basically you can imagine the guy at the end drinking the tequila looking over at the guys drinking the cherry martinis and smirking to himself like he was thinking these men were "pussies" for drinking "frilly" drinks and not a MANLY GLASS OF STRAIGHT TEQUILA! (using that word for illustrative purposes since that word is often used to put down Men using sexist "weakening" names).
The commercial has gone to the trouble of putting him in a suit while the other two guys are wearing current, "young" styles and then they show the Tequila-drinker getting off a train, walking, implying that he might be entering a boardroom, perhaps giving a speech. He's POWERFUL! His JAW IS CHISELED! He wants a REAL DRINK for a REAL MAN! (again, all of this tongue in cheek)

There are a ton of examples of this kind of bullshit all over the radio, tv, the internet, and magazines that are way more subtle than a picture of a woman in an apron serving a frozen dinner (like the one above).

Can we share some examples? (please be careful about nudity if you link to photos and I'd prefer no photos of children)

What are some things you have seen in advertising and/or marketing that made you want to roll your eyes?

[Gráinne]

I should probably stay away from the boards tonight I'm in one of those moods.

Of course, sexism in the ways you mean it has been around since the dawn of television and print. But, a more insidious sexism works the other way; the common theme of smart wife/all-capable mother and doofus man. I think those ads are just as demeaning.

Maybe that's why I feel a little uncomfortable whenever I see the expression "2x4 Butch" here. Maybe it's just me, but it almost sounds like "smart Femme, clueless Butch" in the same way. I've seen that dynamic now and then on here.(NOT equating Butch=Male, again).

This one, for example, was pulled:



With that said, don't think it's only a recent thing:

[Selenay]

If you don't read French, it translates to, "Touch both sides. Twice the sensations."

[CherylNYC]

ACH! Why am I doing this? I probably shouldn't even LOOK at this thread! I'm signing up anyway. Sigh. I guess I'm an even bigger masochist than I thought. I'll be happy to participate in a feminist critique of commercials and advertising.

I've worked in the entertainment industry since around 1968(!) at not quite 6 years old, but as an adult I've only worked behind the scenes instead of in front of the camera. Just as they were when I was a little girl, commercials are still the most offensive of all the woman-hating offensive advertising drivel to which we're continually exposed. Advertising strategy has been changing with evolving technology, but a typical 1/2 hour sitcom still has 20 minutes of dialogue and 10 minutes of 30 second advertising spots. Each spot has to convey a strong, easily read morality play within its tiny time frame. Everything from the carefully arranged neckline for the carefully chosen actress, to the selective, very engineered lighting has to convey the message that this woman is a good wife because she successfully keeps the house clean for her husband and family. Gaaah! If you've never been on a set, especially for a commercial, you just can't imagine how much time is lavished on each horrifying detail. Nothing is coincidental. Every detail is intentional. Every single thing that gets on camera in a commercial is designed to manipulate the viewer into seeing those cleaning products as imperative to the moral standing of any decent woman.

I didn't watch much television in the last year or so that I spent living in my parent's house, and I didn't have a television at all once I left at around 17 y/o. My long ago ex loved her TV, so I was exposed to it again while I lived with her for six years. I was thrilled to leave it behind when I left her. I vowed that I would never have another one of those poison vectors in my house again. That means I've lived with significant exposure to TV for not quite 23 years out of my 51. Lack of exposure has only increased my sensitivity to the hideous messaging that I do happen to see whenever I'm involountarily exposed to TV!

So, there you have it. I'm prepared to give a totally unbiased, even handed critique of advertising media. Bring it on.

As for the liquor commercial, besides the, uhh, pussies drinking cocktails with pink cherries in them, (except for the strong, masculine blue of the liquor bottle, all the other colour in film is very brown and subdued except for those tell-tale bright pink cherries), there's only one woman in this commercial who is more than just a blur in the crowd, and she appears in perhaps as many as four frames. She's walking towards him in the crowd, then turns her body to cede space to the all-important scotch drinking man. Then she follows him with her awe-struck eyes that say, "You intimidate me enough to want to have sex with you right here and now".

Retch.

[Soon]

[Kobi]

[The_Lady_Snow]

Ya'll know how much I LOVEEEEEEEE the Superbowl...... Which is filled up with crazy, sexist, harmful, images flashing before our eyes while we all sit glued to the TV and look forward to those infamous commercials that cost millions of dollars...

Danika Patrick perpetuates the continual break down of women into parts to plug in her sponsor GO Daddy.

Anyone remember feeling uncomfortable after watching this woman and young man slobber all over one another and the spit webbing off their mouth? YUCKO

Even candy isn't safe




This was actually a shoe advertisement for Sketchers:

This was part of a Dorito advertisement

[The_Lady_Snow]

We've gone as far as sexualizing animals....... DIdn't anyone else find it WEIRD that women were oogling over a dog?

[girl_dee]

saw this one a few minutes ago...

[girl_dee]

[girl_dee]

[Katniss]

Some of you may have seen this a few weeks back as it got a bit of press coverage. I showed the commercial to my 11 year old and she said, "It's about time someone listened to us girls." There is a current back and forth going on between the Beastie Boys copyrights on the song and Goldie Blox the toy company. Regardless of how that sorts out I am all about S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) for girls.





Katniss~~(it's never to young to get your inner geek on.)

[CherylNYC]

Originally Posted by Katniss

Some of you may have seen this a few weeks back as it got a bit of press coverage. I showed the commercial to my 11 year old and she said, "It's about time someone listened to us girls." There is a current back and forth going on between the Beastie Boys copyrights on the song and Goldie Blox the toy company. Regardless of how that sorts out I am all about S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) for girls.





Katniss~~(it's never to young to get your inner geek on.)

That was awesome!

[The_Lady_Snow]

Pantene has taken the opportunity like Dove did to show how labels are attached to behaviors and grooming, in males it is seen as a good thing, an acceptable thing, necessary, for the career of a man, as where women are demeaned with labeling

[The_Lady_Snow]

Ahh it's my LEAST favorite time of the year, a time when all sexism and misogyny is pulled out in full force, making women look dumb, useless, without having any kind of life other than for the men in their worlds including their over bearing sons.


Let me introduce you to the latest women hate in advertising

Here we have the misconception that Mothers/Women do nothing but live for the men in their lives and if they do decide to move on and find a mate *we* (Moms.women) are so distraught we are reduced to creepy, bad dressed, bad haired, distraught creeper/stalkers.


*spits* it's disgusting

[CherylNYC]

Originally Posted by The_Lady_Snow

Ahh it's my LEAST favorite time of the year, a time when all sexism and misogyny is pulled out in full force, making women look dumb, useless, without having any kind of life other than for the men in their worlds including their over bearing sons.


Let me introduce you to the latest women hate in advertising

Here we have the misconception that Mothers/Women do nothing but live for the men in their lives and if they do decide to move on and find a mate *we* (Moms.women) are so distraught we are reduced to creepy, bad dressed, bad haired, distraught creeper/stalkers.


*spits* it's disgusting

Yikes! I would have lost my lunch had I been in the meeting where they pitched this POS.

[Yew]

I stopped subscribing to Psychology Today magazine because almost every cover featured a pieced out or semi-obscured female image on it, often used too promote articls and concepts of thing that 'we' aka everyone, needs to change...yet no images of men were evident! This pissed me off badly enough that I took a few of them to my MSW Diversity class to use as an example of sexism. I post the link here...I see at least 8 images using women in thisv derogatory manner, just on one page of the site. I was and remain awed that a psychology production does this, as sexism, invisibility and micro-aggressions are pretty hot topics to psychology in general. I do enjoy and find interesting many of this magazines articles but can't stomach seeing cover after cover with women who are relegated to body parts, faceless or with words, paint etc hiding the faces that are there

http://www.psychologytoday.com/magazine?tr=Hdr_Magazine

And actually, I felt similarly at the time about the Equality magazine that the HRC was mailing out- most women depicted were femme(no offense to femme's, but...) the lack of images of butch women got me fired up as well as the lack of trans people...lot's of pretty gay men, femmes and sporty types; they at least got cultural/ethnic diversity in there, which I gave kudos for but the rest left out too many folks who represent and make up the lgbtq continuum, reinforcing my beliefs that the magazines purpose was to pander to the allies who donate to the HRC by soft pedaling exactly who lgbtq people even are

[Gráinne]

Now, granted, I like Weight Watchers and I believe it's one of the best programs out there for eating healthy, not just "losing weight".

But this is in my craw. Jessica Simpson's voice intoning "Remember when life was simple and your job was to have fun?" I guess I feel that I'm not allowed to have fun until I lose weight to some magical number, and that as a female, I'm automatically supposed to diet. I feel badly for the little girl who will hit some age and boom-time to diet! And eating healthy is a drudge. (so it seems to imply).

Ever notice that all weight-loss commercials are focused on and star only girls/women? Men's commercials are about building muscle, losing fat and getting stronger, with no reference to weight. Weight is just a number, but as a woman in this country, you'd better be the "right" number.

[Kobi]

Beautiful women posed as dead bodies are an advertising campaign staple, including the new Marc Jacobs shoot starring Miley Cyrus. Why does fashion fetishise the female corpse?

For once it's not the image of Miley Cyrus herself that is controversial. It's the woman lying next to her. In a new advertising campaign for Marc Jacobs, Miley and two female models pose on a moonlit beach, Miley sitting up, staring moodily into the middle distance, a woman standing behind her, while another lies on the sand. This model isn't reclining happily, or curled up asleep; she is flat on her back, hair partially covering her face, with the stiff, sightless demeanour of a body in the morgue. A beautifully dressed one, of course.

This ad campaign was released a day after the latest cover of US magazine Entertainment Weekly, which shows the two stars of upcoming film Gone Girl lying on a gurney. Ben Affleck is fully dressed and alert, curled awkwardly around Rosamund Pike, who is in a bra and slip, pale, wide-eyed with surprise, very much dead. A tag is tied carefully around her toe.

This isn't the first time dead women have been used in fashion or entertainment, of course. Over the years female corpses, especially beautiful female corpses, have become a staple of fashion shoots, advertising campaigns and TV shows – with sexual and fatal violence against women a favourite of TV programmes looking to boost a waning audience or build a new one.

Last year Vice magazine decided to illustrate their Women in Fiction issue with a fashion shoot depicting a range of well-known writers in the throes of killing themselves, or trying to: Sylvia Plath kneeling in front of an oven; Virginia Woolf standing in a stream, clutching a large stone; Dorothy Parker bleeding heavily into a sink. The fashion credits were included in full, down to the pair of tights used as a noose.

A 2006 Jimmy Choo ad showed a woman apparently passed out in a car boot, a man in dark glasses sitting beside her, brandishing a spade. In 2007 W magazine ran a fashion story featuring model Doutzen Kroes that ticked every box of objectification – multiple images of her seemingly passed out, semi-naked; one in which her lifeless hand held a teddy bear.

That same year, America's Next Top Model illustrated this trend with an episode in which the contestants had to pose as if they'd just been killed. This prompted surreal comments from the judges. One woman, posed as if she'd just been brutally stabbed, was criticised for not looking dead enough. Another, posed as if she had fallen from a tall building, was told "death becomes you, young lady". Still another, covered in deep bruises at the bottom of a flight of stairs, was told: "the look on your face is just extraordinary. Very beautiful and dead." The show could hardly have gone further in illustrating fashion's fetishisation of the female corpse.

This obsession with death isn't so surprising, when you consider it as the obvious and ultimate end point of a spectrum in which women's passivity and silence is sexualised, stylised and highly saleable. Over the past few years, there have been a number of brilliant projects that have shown the eye-popping strangeness of how women are posed for the camera, contorted into positions which make them look simultaneously ridiculous, weak, sexually available and highly vulnerable.

In 2011, for instance, Spanish artist Yolanda Domínguez created Poses, a project in which ordinary women reproduced model poses in everyday settings. One reclined awkwardly in a flower bed; another stood on the street, legs apart, bent forward, sucking her fingers; another posed, hip cocked, a clutch bag held dramatically to her forehead. People all around them gawped and did double takes.

Last year, a Swedish project showed the difference between the way men and women are posed in the notoriously creepy American Apparel ads, with a man gamely copying some of the female poses favoured by the company. Suddenly the incredible weirdness of a woman crouched on all fours, naked from the waist down, back arched to show off a denim shirt was completely clear.

A similarly effective gender swap was carried out by cartoonist Kevin Bolk, who decided to transform an Avengers poster so that all the men were posed as the one female character, played by Scarlett Johansson, had been on the genuine poster. The male characters immediately went from looking active, engaged and ready to defend themselves to being little more than display vehicles for their own buttocks.

Do people actually want these images? Do they want violence against women to be sexualised? There are some strong signs that they don't, from all the women who speak out against these images (Vice magazine ended up apologising and removing their fashion spread from the web as a result), to the news item, published last week, which showed that films that pass the Bechdel test – which offer at least two female characters, who have a conversation, about something other than a man –outperform their counterparts at the box office. Last year, of the 50 highest-grossing films in the US, those that passed the Bechdel test earned $176m at the box office, while those that didn't averaged $116m.

Still, there's a reason these images proliferate. If the sexualised stereotype of a woman in our culture is passive and vulnerable, the advertising industry has worked out that, taken to its logical conclusion, there is nothing more alluring than a dead girl.

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The TOS prohibit pictures of dead bodies. The full article and picture links can be found here.

[Kobi]