Cop Assignment

“To What Extent Does Advertising Construct Our Ideas Of Gender?”

In this day and age, people are highly concerned with equality and equal opportunities for everyone in our society, but has this always been reflected within advertising? This assignment will investigate the use of gender and gender ideas in advertising. It will be closely focusing on how women are often portrayed as being simple, or even worse, stupid, within certain advertisements. The assignment will look in detail at a number of different advertisements that are guilty of portraying women as nothing more than dummies, used to decorate advertisements in order to sell products.

One piece of advertising that has been used which could cause a negative construction of gender ideas is an advert from 1953 used by Alcoa Aluminium. It is advertising the invention of a flip up lid which is shown on a Del Monte ketchup bottle. The advert uses very bright colours to attract viewers. The background is a bright, sunshine yellow which makes the woman stand out and clashes with the shocking red of her lips and the emerald green of her shirt. It is a 50’s60’s style image showing a very beautiful pin up style woman made up with red lipstick and perfect hair. She has been styled this way to gain attention from both men and women, as men will be attracted to her and other women will aspire to look like her. The woman’s mouth is fixed in a large red pout, making her look both provocative and shocked at her ability to open a bottle without requiring assistance from a man. The advertisement has used sex appeal to promote the product. Chang and Tseng say ‘The cliché ‘sex sells’ is apparently held in high esteem by advertisers who continue to rely on the use of the sexual appeal as a marketing strategy’ (Chang and Tseng, 2013). The advertisers have been very clever at using sex appeal in this advert as a marketing strategy.

Women will be compelled to buy the product because they have seen this advertisement and they will think that by buying this product, it will make them look and feel like the woman in the advertisement. Therefore, the product will boost their confidence and self-esteem. The woman has her pouting lips slightly open and they are closely positioned to the phallic-shaped ketchup bottle. This could be a subtle reference to a sexual act. This has been done to attract male customers as males would find this appealing. The advert is derogatory towards women because of the sentence next to the woman in the advertisement ‘You mean a woman can open it…?’ This is derogatory because it is saying that women cannot open a tomato ketchup bottle as they are not strong enough. It also insinuates that woman are weak and are not as strong as men, therefore, they would not be capable of any household tasks, or any lesser tasks, such as opening a bottle. The advertisement is suggesting that woman are not capable of doing anything for themselves and completely rely on men to do anything strenuous for them, which could point to society still treating women as second class citizens as they are dependent on males. Women did not have many rights in the 1950’s, they were expected to be housewives whose lives were fully devoted to looking after their homes and families to the best of their ability. (Castelow, 2012). In the UK now, there are equal rights and equal opportunities for all women, since women won the right to vote in the UK.

The second image is an advertisement released in the early 1970’s for Volkswagen’s newest car, the Mini Automatic. The advert shows a close up picture of a woman inside a car, behind the steering wheel, with the text ‘The Mini Automatic. For Simple Driving.’ The interior of the car in the background has been kept very dull, using dark browns and greys, probably to avoid diverting the viewers’ attention away from the woman in the centre of the advert. The woman has very bright ginger, volumised hair and is wearing lots of makeup, again, like the first advertisement; she has been styled in this way to attract the eyes of both men and women, as yet again, men would find the woman attractive and women would aspire to look like her. The woman’s heavily made up eyes are wide and make her look shocked and scared, as if she doesn’t know how to drive. The word ‘simple’ is more than likely a subtle reference to the woman in the advert and is suggesting that their new car is so easy to drive that even the dumb looking woman in the advert could drive it. The word ‘simple’ is also often used a word to describe someone who is not very clever and perhaps a bit slow. The woman in the advert is clutching the top of the steering wheel with both hands; her fingers decorated with several large rings and perfectly polished red fingernails. Belch, Belch and Severn say “Another type of sexual appeal focuses primarily on the use of "decorative models.” Decorative models are defined as non-functional models whose primary activity is to adorn the product as a sexual or attractive stimulus” (A. Belch, E. Belch and Severn, 1990). The fact that the woman has been made to look all done up and glamorous is another subtle way to attract both sexes to the advertisement, as men will find the over-sexualised model very alluring and women will want to look like her and potentially purchase this new make of car in a bid to look and feel like the woman without being scared, as the advert suggests it is ‘simple’ to drive. The woman is biting her bottom lip which makes her look both nervous and perhaps a little embarrassed by her driving; however someone biting their lip can be seen as being quite sexual, which again, could be a subtle attempt, by the designer of the advert, to attract male customers. The fact that the woman is dripping with jewellery, has perfectly styled hair and pristinely manicured nails suggests that most women are too self-obsessed and focused on their appearance to have time to learn or care about things like being able to drive properly.

The third advertisement is a poster produced in 1952, by a brewing company in Wisconsin named Schlitz. The advert shows a stereotypical 1950’s couple, a suit clad man with hair slicked back and a woman, wearing a high waist patterned skirt and her hair perfectly in place. The advert is promoting a new beer by Schlitz, but there are only two very small images of the actual beers in the advert. The main focus in this is the man and woman and the text that says ‘Don’t worry darling, you didn’t burn the beer!’. The advertisement shows the man with one arm round the woman and gesturing towards the two bottles of beer on the table with the other hand, and a grin plastered on his face. The woman however, is shown looking up at the man whilst dramatically crying and wiping her tears with a handkerchief in a ‘damsel in distress’ kind of fashion. This is subtly suggesting that women are weak when it comes to their emotions and get distressed at simple things such as burning her husband’s dinner. In the advert, the woman rather limply holds a large blackened pan with dark smoke rising from it. The fact that the text, or the man in the advert even, is saying ‘Don’t worry darling, you didn’t burn the beer!’ suggests that although the woman, clearly a 1950’s housewife, is incapable of doing everyday tasks such as cooking, without getting it wrong and burning everything apart from the beer. The way in which the woman is crying and looking up at the man with a very sad expression on her face over something so little as burning the food, insinuates that all the woman has in her life is being a housewife and cooking all day long for her husband, and when she is too slack that she cannot even do this to the best of her ability, upset, she turns to her husband as she needs his reassurance. In the 1950’s it was completely normal for men to tell their wives what they should and shouldn’t do and women would do as they were told. Writer RoobixCoob says ‘Women were supposed to fulfill certain roles, such as a caring mother, a diligent homemaker, and an obedient wife.’ (RoobixCoob, 2005) This particular advertisement however is portraying the woman as being so mindless that she cannot even fulfil the roles that were set for women in the 1950’s.

Another advertisement that is guilty of portraying women as nothing more than simple beings who do everything a man asks of them is by Tipalet, which was a very famous cigarette product. The advert was produced in the 1980’s and depicts a dark haired man wearing black clothing smoking a Tipalet cigarette nearby a beautiful woman, who has been styled similarly to the women in the previous advertisements, with heavy makeup and very volumised hair. She is also wearing clothing that is rather revealing particularly on her chest. She has been made to stand out against the bright yellow background as she has very bold dark hair and tanned skin.

The way the woman is posed is also rather interesting in the way that she is slightly bent over, although only her head and the very top of her torso is visible, this can be told from the angle that she emerges from the sides of the poster and the way in which she is looking up at the dark hair man smoking the Tipalet, whilst being leant slightly towards him. The most important part of this particular poster however is the text. In bold white lettering, the advertisement reads ‘Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere’. This is a particularly awful way of trying to entice men into smoking Tipalet cigarette products, as it is basically telling the men viewing the advertisement that if they do smoke their products, they will be able to make a woman do whatever they please.

The whole advertisement is extremely derogatory towards women, but the part that is most shocking is the fact that it is portraying women as some sort of animal or pet, who can’t think or do anything for themselves and will ‘follow’ men anywhere when they inhale the smoke of the Tipalet product he is using. Carmen Luke says ‘the lesson for girls is that women are generally mindless and powerless, either domestic drudges or saintly super mums, sexual sirens or brain-dead bimbos’ (Luke, 1996) The advertisement clearly backs this quote from Luke up as it is obvious that the producer of such an awfully sexist advertisement shared similar views in that women are ‘mindless and powerless’. This quote from Luke is obviously what the producers of the Tipalet advertisement believed as they have made it clear in the poster that they feel that women are ‘mindless’ and ‘powerless’. Even though this particular poster was produced in the 1980’s, the attitude towards women depicted in the advertisements is almost identical to that of those produced in the 1950’s, suggesting that ‘the lesson’ which Luke wrote about, was still being reinforced by many people and many companies who seemed to think that this type of derogatory behaviour and attitude towards women was perfectly fine and normal.

Looking at something other than a sexist advertisement this time, instead this is an editorial piece titled ‘sexist chivalry’, made in 2015 by nomad illustrator Mogaz. The illustration depicts a man and a woman walking side by side. While the two characters do not have any facial features, the man is clearly facing the woman whilst he presumably talks. This is suggested by the fact he has one arm outstretched as if gesturing towards something as he perhaps tells a story, meanwhile the woman is looking downwards. The man’s other arm is around the woman’s shoulder, which is completely normal aside from the fact that his arm wraps around the woman’s entire torso, flattening her arms by her side so that she cannot move them or escape the grip of the man. This could be interpreted in a number of different ways. The fact that the man is not letting the woman move her arms or leave his side could be the Illustrators way of portraying an abusive controlling relationship, of which the woman cannot escape as she is trapped by the man’s controlling behaviour. Not only could Mogaz be trying to portray that of an abusive relationship, he could also be trying to show the ideas of some people, that have been looked at throughout this assignment, in which people think that women should be controlled as they cannot think or do for themselves. The tight grip the man has on the woman could be Mogaz’ way of showing that ideology of some that women should be told what to do and controlled by a man. The fact that the woman is slightly behind the man in the image suggests this, as it is almost as if the man is forcing the woman to walk, or rather like he is taking her for a walk like an obedient pet. The limited colour palette of which Mogaz has chosen to work with is rather interesting in the way that he has chosen to use several shades of blue for the two characters, which are placed upon a solid pink background. It is clear that he has chosen these colours as a way of representing sexism as blue and pink are often colours that are associated with the two different sexes. The most interesting part however is that fact that Mogaz has chosen to do both the man and the woman in blue, as it is a colour mainly associated with men. This could be argued that the Illustrator is trying to show that the man has full control over the woman or perhaps that the man now owns this woman, as she is painted in the same blue tones as her controlling male companion. A quote from an article by Jill Nichols and Pat Moan is this; ‘A man comes down the tunnel and looks me up and down. All these ads are like his gang – telling him I am a cunt-thing, a leg-thing, a breast-thing and that I am waiting for him. He is psyched up to think that he has a right to me.’ (Nichols and Moan, July 1978) Focusing more on the woman now, her overall body language suggests she is unhappy and even frightened of the man as one arm is being held tight to her side with her fingers straight, almost in a robotic way, as if she scared to try and escape the man’s grasp. Similarly to the advertisements, the Illustrator has styled to woman in a rather stereotypical manner. Although she does not have heavy makeup as this is a very simplified illustration, she has similar long, volumised hair and is wearing a short dress.

This assignment has focused closely on how advertisements and pieces of illustration can be used to negatively portray women. Not only exploring advertisements from times when sexism towards women was seen as a normal attitude to have back in the 1950’s, but also looking at more recent pieces from the 1980’s. Showing women as being nothing more than decorative and mindless objects in advertisements is something that seems to be dying out, as most of the advertisements which showed this dated back to the 50’s-70’s. This is changing now as women, particularly in first world countries, have more of a voice, thanks to social media platforms where it is easy for people to share and call out sexism, where it is possible to make such a huge mark that companies who still do use women in this way have no choice but to change things. This will probably continue to change, as the world and the views of the people in it are constantly changing, although there are still many people who still have views that are more suited to the 1950’s, most people today agree that sexism and a negative portrayal of women in the media is wrong.

References: Can sex sell bread? The impacts of sexual appeal type, product type and sensation seeking Chun-Tuan Chang National Sun Yat-sen University Chien-Hun Tseng Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 559 559 International Journal of Advertising, 32(4), pp. 559–585 © 2013 Advertising Association Published by Warc, www.warc.com DOI: 10.2501/IJA-32-4-559-585 The 1950s Housewife, Ellen Castelow, 2012 http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-1950s-Housewife/ The Effects of Sexual and Non-sexual Advertising Appeals and Information Level on Cognitive Processing and Communication Effectiveness ©]ournal of Advertising Volume 19, Number 1, 1990, Page 14-22 Jessica Severn (Ph.D., University of Washington) George E. Belch (Ph.D., University of California-Los Angeles) Michael A. Belch (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) A Woman's Role in the 1950s 134 November 17, 2005 by RoobixCoob Chapter in G. Bull & M. Anstey (Eds.) (1996) Carmen Luke The literacy lexicon.

Edwi Mardiyoko ANALYSIS OF ADVERTISEMENT https://edwimardiyoko.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/analysis-ofadvertisement/ What offends one of us won’t offend the next chap" by Pat Moan and Jill Nicholls (Spare Rib, Issue 72, July 1978 http://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2015/may/spare-rib-magazine-goes-online-for-the-firsttime#sthash.WZcHzcqR.dpuf http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/articles/body-image-advertising-and-the-media#sthash.w0Jjs4mD.dpuf