Gender Roles in Advertisements
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| If you help her choose the clothes someone else will tear, she's seeing you with braids. Stop being a friend and start being a man |
For this task, I picked three Lynx/Axe advertisements. Lynx is the British version of Axe. All of these advertisements both objectify and sexualize women in order to try and sell their product. In every single one, the women are wearing minimal clothing. The first advertisement shows a man and a few women clothes shopping. The point they are trying to make is that if a man does not pick provocative clothes when shopping with women, then they will only see him as a friend rather than someone they might date. This puts a gender role on men needing to be the direct ones in a relationship, which is not necessarily a bad gender role. However, it is portrayed in such bad taste that it makes the gender role so much worse. It also emasculates men who might not feel confident approaching girls. The second advertisement has a woman in the kitchen preparing a turkey in minimal clothing, and posing in a provocative way. This suggests a more well known gender role of women having to prepare the food in the family and that they should stay at home. The ad line also suggests a need for men needing to stay in control of women, saying that she might make you lose control but by using their product you will gain full control again. The third post is the most provocative of all. They include both a man and a woman posing in a similar way. The man is pouring shower gel over himself (the product), while the woman is pouring whipped cream over herself. This advertisement does not have any specific gender role involved, however it does showcase the active/decorative style of advertising. The man is actively interacting with the product itself, whereas the woman is simply there to decorate the advertisement. As all of these ads come from the same brand, you can see their marketing strategy has a certain constant, which is the objectification and use of women as decoration. All these ads - especially the first two - hint at attractive women being the ultimate desire of all men, and men needing to be more assertive and controlling over women.
All of the three ads are really well chosen and all of them show stereotypes that are frequently used today. The first one that shows that basically men can't shop with women because women will only see them as friends. The second picture that shows a provocative woman cooking is doing two things that men "love" women for. One being naked and the other cooking and finally the third that shows women being clean are "dirty" and sexy as well as very attractive.
ReplyDeleteI liked the choice of ads used, which focused on the objectification of women and the idea that they're only there to please men is seen in the ads. It also depicts how society has portrayed what is "typical male" behavior, in which they only have desire for women. I liked how you not only explained the effect to had on girls, which most of us knowledge, but you also talked about how men would react to it, and they would lose confidence. Great way to support your argument. Overall, a very interesting and eye-opening blog post.
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