Kieran Blakey OUIL401 How does advertising affect children during their formative years and to what extent does it construct their ideas of gender? As children are raised, masculinity and femininity are thought to be traits that they acquire from nurture or the way individuals have been raised. They can be thought of as being ‘casually constructed’ (Haslanger 1995, 98) where gender socialisation has created an environment through advertising of passive gender separation. For example. Kate Millett takes these gender differences to be “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from different treatments (1971, 28-‐29). Advertising is incredibly influential and ever since the rise of the industrial revolution ‘middle class Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints’ (Wolf 1991), this influence trickling down the family hierarchy and being passed along to the next generation. Through this essay I hope to address the influence of advertising over children during their formative years and whether or not this has a profound effect in constructing their ideas of gender. We’re told that blue is for boys and that pink is for girls. These gender norms are however, more a contrivance of our society and culture than an inherently biological difference between the sexes. Colour coding genders with blue for boys and pink for girls only started to become established during the 20th century and is therefore not an evolution of preferred colour between sexes. Because people strive to fit in with ‘gender norms’ as a society, it allows media and marketing to encapsulate on this as a way of convincing you that their product helps you fit into these specific gender boundaries. As Kirkham (1996) puts ‘In our society today, the main visual oppositions which cluster around that of male/female include light/dark, pink/blue and large/small’ and this also extends into hard/soft and rational/irrational, creating an environment for impressionable youth that subversion or weak indicates femininity and that dominance and strength represent masculinity. Indeed, this has always been the case, even before the colours were switched as at one point, ‘pink was considered more of a boy’s color, as a watered-‐down, bold, dramatic red, which is a fierce color. Instead, blue was considered more for girls. (Frassanito & Pettorini, 2008, p. 881)’. Men have always been considered as being superior to women so changing the cultural norm of assigning pink to boys shows the power of advertising within a culture. Evidence of this can be easily picked up on by adverts such as in figure 1 which is seemingly encouraging boys to be active and play sport with a more masculine green aesthetic, and for girls to be interested in ‘love’ or dainty flowers using pink as its motif. This kind of advertising also creates a stigmatism around femininity, portraying little girls as being more considered, emotional and boring, choosing to look at pretty flowers as being more interesting than playing around. This kind of mind-‐set encourages a divide between little boys and girls, constructing their psyche to expect less from or more administerial roles from females, and bringing it forwards into adult life. A contributing factor towards this change is also the actions of Hitler assigning pink triangles to homosexuals in his work camps. Categorizing a community or collective in this way successfully functions as ‘classification is achieved because colour functions as a marker of social identity (Koller, 2008)’. Because being gay is strongly associated with being weak or subservient in a male-‐dominated
Kieran Blakey OUIL401 heteronormative society, pink must therefore be a ‘girl colour’. The social construct of gendered colour happened during a time when mass marketing was appearing, and is suggested by Philip Cohen, that essentially, they are just the outcome of a marketing ploy. This would make advertising one of the main contributing factors towards personal gender identities and instrumental in characterizing attributes or qualities that are stereotypically applied to each sex. To properly capitalize on a market, you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to reach your largest demographic. However, because children as an audience have very few views or prejudices themselves, advertisers will market more to the parents or guardians. This creates a situation whereby adults perpetuate ingrained gender norms to their children, who then in turn internalize it. This is extremely damaging within a closed culture where individuality is discriminated against, spreading misinformation to impressionable youth and putting masculinity onto a pedestal. This can be seen in figure 2, advertisers present toys about science, information and learning to boys with girls being given toys about jewelry or princesses. Boys are seemingly being presented with the idea that they can do anything, be the best they can be and that it’s good to strive for personal improvement. This is also seen on the figure 3 book covers and one of the areas of ‘commercial provision where advertising practitioners have played a more intensified role in recent years has been in relation to men’s markets and the consumption identities of young men (Nixon 2003)’. By constantly bombarding young boys with the idea they need to be the most intelligent, strongest, fastest and in general better than girls, creates a fierce environment of toxic masculinity where anything less than is seen as weak or feminine. This competitive environment constructs the entire male view of gender and is rooted deep in children advertisements, where they’re told girls and women in general care more about their looks and materialism than contributing to society. Interestingly, advertising for alcohol and adult make-‐up is also aimed at younger audiences. This is not for the direct purpose of selling age-‐prohibited products to children but in order to create positive associations with a more care-‐free or ‘fun’ lifestyle, such as in figure 4. One of the classic examples of this is the ‘Budweiser frog campaign’ launched during the mid 90’s and which proved to be most popular amongst kids over the age of six. Beating out competitors such as Pepsi, Nike and McDonald’s. According to a 1996 survey by the ‘Centre on Alcohol Advertising’, almost as many children between the ages of 9-‐11 know that frogs say “Budweiser” as they do that Bugs Bunny says “what’s up, Doc?” with only a 7 percent difference from 73 to 80 percent. Often these adverts show cartoon animals which prove to be incredibly enticing but also show semi-‐nude or ‘sexy’ women drinking it. For the majority, beer is marketed towards grown men and often presents women in their advertisements as being enticed or attracted towards a man that drinks. They show women as having no defining characteristics other than having a perfect body and being aroused by beer. This presents an extremely harmful view to young, impressionable girls growing up that their body and looks define them more than their personality or viewpoint. This can create a male-‐dominated internalized view of themselves where eating
Kieran Blakey OUIL401 disorders and depression run rampant in order to cultivate the perfect body growing up. This, as Kilbourne puts it, ‘offers some hope of control and success to a young woman with a poor self-‐image and overwhelming personal problems that have no easy solution’. Having these images constantly bombard young girls creates an environment where they start to perceive being ‘feminine’ as possessing all these traits and that not having the ‘perfect’ body shape results in them being considered ‘manly’, or less of a girl/woman. What is considered to be the perfect man or women is mostly determined by our culture and can even be argued that gender itself is just a social construct. Advertising pushes the general boundaries of what constitutes a healthy body, rationalizing the idea in younger minds that they should strive to achieve unattainable standards in terms of their body identity and gender orientation. Having adverts such as figure 5 is also extremely toxic to younger males. From their perspective they are taught to believe that girls are just basic cookie-‐cutter replicas of each other and that they are more of a commercial commodity rather than a human. This idea is also constantly being reinforced by popular culture such as in the figure 3 books and even animated TV shows such as ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Family Guy’. Growing up watching mostly male television characters and actors being given whatever they want from their female contemporary’s conditions them with the warped view that they simultaneously need to do nothing to succeed and and a crushing responsibility to make sure they are an alpha male that can provide for everyone else. Hyper-‐masculinity is represented as being the leader, the strongest or the most responsible, something which is exemplified in the boy/girl Disney poster. The little girl is smiling and dancing whilst the little boy is stoic and unimpressed. Figure 5 is extremely indicative of the traditional frame of mind that says men need to work hard and that boys shouldn’t dance or be overly emotional. You could argue that he’s merely being posed in context to the film, ‘Cars’, with the advert deliberately juxtaposing it to the happier film of ‘Cinderella’, with faults lying in the source material itself. Similarly, though, the profession of a mechanic is an intrinsically masculine one in our society and one that many people pursue daily. Its usage here implies that it would be the male alternative to being a princess and that showing emotion is equal to femininity which is again equal to triviality. Men are to be strong and to show emotion is to be female. Boys aren’t allowed to cry and advertising directors know this well enough to craft miniature gender replicas for children to base this identity on. Barbie has long been considered a controversial issue of middle class parents whether she validates or rejects traditional gender politics. Parents in general struggle whether to give their child something that nurtures their growth or something that the child themselves want, since companies such as Mattel primarily market towards young girls and boys, Barbie and Action Man have long been family favourites. However, despite these toys being intended for children, they objectify each gender with grown adult dolls, showing them with fully developed mature bodies. Jean Kilbourne identifies that ‘even very little girls are offered makeup and toys like special night Barbie, which shows them how to dress for a night out’ (160) and that presents younger girls with such an overwhelmingly negative view about their natural bodies and can only help
Kieran Blakey OUIL401 advertisers further engender positive receptions of their own products. Barbie and Action Man are hyper-‐realised perceptions of traditional male and female archetypes and create a strong correlation between their characteristics, and the characteristics of each gender. Strong and outgoing being reserved for males and fashion, poise and accessories being classed as female. This is extremely obvious if we were to chart the number of different joints and sockets that go into creating each doll. When Action Man first appeared they forwent realistic anatomy in order to give the toy more dynamism, immediately presenting it as a toy that could do or be anything it wanted. Unlike Action Man however with ‘its twenty moveable joints, the original Barbie only had joints where the arms, legs and head attached to the body’ (Attfield 1996, pg.85). By charting the number of joints within the doll it completely bypasses regular arguments regarding gender and provides clear, quantifiable evidence of how the traditional clichés of feminine being passive and masculine being active is present in the very design of the dolls. The point being that young children are easily impressionable and therefore having and seeing toys, expressly advertised towards them, strongly presents the view that this is what they should aim towards with their own lives. It creates a hierarchy within each gender and is what promotes toxic masculinity in men, and eating disorders and bulimia in women. It can be argued that since each doll has so little overlap (the distinction being Ken), it divides children from a very young age and in turn, constructs their ideas about how each gender should appear. Little boys feeling inadequate that they’re not as strong or as fast as their counterparts and little girls feel they aren’t feminine due to their looks or weight. ‘If there's a message packaged in the toys we're giving to girls, there must be a message packaged in the toys we're giving to boys as well’ (Coyle 2010). Barbie’s image is one of a stereotypical male fantasy but with recent years has become more flexible in order to accommodate for more adventurous roles. Although being given more movement serves mostly just to wear and display a greater range of outfits, the impact she has can be seen from a study by Emily Coyle. Bringing in 26 preschool girls with most of them believing they could not do non-‐stereotypical jobs and after being shown Barbie being dressed to perform a range of ‘masculine’ jobs, the majority of the girls then said they could see themselves doing the job the outfit represented. The point of this study is to prove that representation matters. Showing someone consistently doing the same thing such as in advertising and with colours ingrains into our psyche, defining what we consider to be ‘masculine’ or feminine’. As Rogers puts it, ‘Above all, it seems, Barbie is an icon of the femininity associated with the middle reaches of contemporary Western societies (1999)’, a cultural centrepiece that draws in children of all ages to engage with her, being marketed across multiple professions and influencing how ‘feminine’ is perceived growing up. Barbie stands as a pillar of Western Beauty, Mark, a white male in his forties interviewed by Rogers, put it this way: ‘Perfect hair. Shapely legs. Faultless breasts. An hourglass torso. For many years this was how I perceived what an ideal woman was supposed to look like. This spurious notion was implanted in my schema at an early age, probably five or six years old. That was when I got my first glimpse of a fully unclothed Barbie doll. (Rogers 1999)’ This inability to distinguish how the dolls differ from their real-‐ life counterparts is common and goes a long way to explaining how her
Kieran Blakey OUIL401 marketing has moulded the minds of impressionable youths who aspire to become her. This desire is extremely harmful since Barbie’s height and weight proportions are not only unattainable but extremely unhealthy. ‘The ultrathin female beauty ideal she embodies has been linked with the extraordinary prevalence of negative body image and unhealthy eating patterns among girls and women (Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-‐Dunn, 1999)’ This idealism is by no means unusual and is shared by both genders and when asked about to Donna, a middle school aged girl, she responded by saying ‘I believe that Barbie has become some children’s role model… I grew up playing with Barbie & Co. I feel she plays a big role in most young kids’ lives. (Rogers 1999)’. As children develop they are constantly subjected to advertisements and themes through television or popular networks, ‘to make boys and girls want things now they cannot have and shouldn’t have for five, ten or twenty years (Varley, 1919)’. Seeing the profit in selling to younger audiences is profound and as Kilbourne states, ‘even very little girls are offered makeup and toys like special night Barbie, which shows them how to dress for a night out (1999)’, teaching a younger audience through marketing on how to present themselves and what they should strive for such as in figure 3. This technique is also utilised against males where hyper-‐masculinity is formed through products such as ‘Action Man’, where if the number of joints is charted against that of a Barbie it ‘illustrates how the cliché of ‘feminine’ as passive and ‘masculine’ as active is literally embodied in the design of the toys (Attfield, 1996)’. This is backed up by Cole who believes If ‘there's a message packaged in the toys we're giving to girls, there must be a message packaged in the toys we're giving to boys as well (2010)’. Furthermore, although these toys are intended for children they represent and objectify gender as fully matured adult bodies, creating a new normal and presenting them as the pinnacle of gendered sexuality. The advertising used for them prevailing on kids networks and strengthening gender socialisation, whereby advertising exists to enforce existing gender stereotypes and tropes in order to succeed commercially (figure 1, 4). ‘The story that advertising tells is that the way to be happy, to find satisfaction-‐ and the path to political freedom as well-‐ is through the consumption of material objects (Kilbourne, 1999)’. That path doesn’t begin as an adult but is forged from a very young age, telling children how to perceive themselves and how to understand the societal role that gender plays between sexes. Bibliography Books/journals: Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender. How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. New York: Norton. (p. 208)
Kieran Blakey OUIL401 Kilbourne, J. (1999). How advertising changes the way we think and feel. New York, Touchstone (pg. 132-4, 160-4) Attfield, J. Kirkham, P. (1996) The Gendered Object. Manchester, Manchester University Press Gauntlett, D. (2008) Media, Gender and Identity. Abingdon: Oxon. Routledge Nixon, S. (2003) Advertising Cultures, London. Sage Publications Aiken, P., Eadie, D., Leathar, D., McNeil, R., Scott, R., and Scott, A. (1988). Television advertisements for alcoholic drinks do reinforce under-age drinking, British Journal of Addiction, 83, 1399-1419. Garfield, B. (1999, March 29) Top 100 advertising campaigns. Advertising Age (special issue: The Advertising Century), 18. Campbell Mithun Etsy (Minneapolis), Reprinted in Harper’s Index (1999, January). Harper’s, 15. Varley, H. (1919, August 14) Dealing in Futures: Insuring sales for the years to come by paying the premium of advertising today. Printer’s ink. Reprinted in Stay Free! (1997, Spring), 23. Lieber, L. (1996). Commercial and character slogan recall by children aged 9 to 11 years. Berkeley, CA: Center on Alcohol Advertising. Haslanger, S. (1995, Fall) Ontology and Social Construction. University of Arkansas press Millett, K. (1971) Sexual Politics. London, Rupert Hart-‐Davis Rogers, M.F. (1999) Barbie Culture. London, Sage publications Wolf, N. (1991) The Beauty Myth. London, Vintage Publishing Internet: Guidice M.D (2012) <https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/delgiudice_2012_reversal_pinkblue-asb.pdf > (accessed 29.11.15) Chiu, S. W. Gervan, S., Fairbrother, C., Johnson, L. L., Owen-Anderson, A. F. H., Bradley, S. J., et al. (2006). Sex-dimorphic color preference in children with gender identity disorder: A comparison to clinical and community controls. Sex Roles, 55, 385–395 (accessed 13.12.15) Coyle, E (2010) <http://www2.wlu.edu/x48373.xml> (accessed 13.12.15) Hartmann, M (2011) <http://jezebel.com/5790638/the-history-of-pink-for-girls-bluefor-boys> (accessed 15.12.15) Hammond, C. (2014) <http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141117-the-pink-vs-bluegender-myth (accessed 17.12.15) Yagar, Z. (2014) < http://theconversation.com/is-barbie-bad-for-body-image-33725> (accessed 04.01.16) Tahsin, M. (2014) < https://www.quora.com/Is-Barbie-a-good-or-bad-influence-ongirls> (accessed 18.02.16) Koller, V. (2008) < http://www.academia.edu/218416/_More_than_just_a_colour_Pink_as_a_gender_and _sexuality_marker_in_visual_communication_ (accessed 05.04.16) Ive, S., Dittmar, H., Halliwell, E. <http://willettsurvey.org/TMSTN/Gender/DoesBarbieMakeGirlsWantToBeThin.pdf (accessed 05.04.16)
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