CI5472 Teaching Film, Television, and Media

Module 6: Studying Advertising

Advertising and Idealized Gender Images

Advertisers also portray various images of gender roles in order to promote certain products associated with achieving those roles. For example, the multi-billion dollar beauty industry employs ads to promote images of ideal femininity (and now masculinity) to equate the use of their products to achieving these ideal gender images. By projecting images of the ideal, ad function to create a sense of inadequacy—that one is imperfect without a certain product. And, these ads also establish a sense of membership in imaginary communities of consumption with others, a “synthetic personalization” with a mass audience treated as an individual “you” to create a “synthetic sisterhood.”

This suggests the need to have students examine the disparities between the ideal image and the reality of their own complex, realistic identity. For example, most female’s body shape do not match the thin body shape of models employed in ads. Adolescents need to recognize that it is impossible to change one’s body shape and therefore to achieve the appearance of models in ads. And, males who believe that they can achieve a muscular, body-builder image through excessive training or even steroid use need to realize the limitations of doing so. Moreover, they need to recognize the health risks of eating disorders, or, for males, steroid use.

The video What a Girl Wants documents the ways in which advertising using celebrity females such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, and Jessica Simpson to promote these idealized images of femininity for females to emulate.

Jean Kilbourne, a leading critic of these ads, in her videos Killing Us Softly3 and Slim Hopes makes the following points in the teacher’s guide accompanying the Killing Us Softly3 video:

As girls reach adolescence, they get the message that they should not be too powerful, should not take up too much space. They are told constantly that they should be less than what they are.
At least 1 in 5 young women in America today has an eating disorder.
One recent study of fourth grade girls found that 80% of them were on diets.
Twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8% less than the average woman. Today, the average model weighs 23% less than the average woman.
Only 5% of women have the body type (tall, genetically thin, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, long-legged and usually small-breasted) seen in almost all advertising. (When the models have large breasts, they’ve almost always had breast implants.)
The obsession with thinness is used to sell cigarettes.
4 out of 5 women are dissatisfied with their appearance.
Almost half of American women are on a diet on any given day.
5–10 million women are struggling with serious eating disorders.
The American food industry spends $36 billion on advertising each year.
Women’s magazines are full of ads for rich foods and recipes.
Eating has become a moral issue. Words such as “guilt” and “sin” are often used to sell food.
Americans spend more than $36 billion dollars on dieting and diet-related products each year.
95% of all dieters regain the weight they lost, and more, within five years.
Articles about the dangers of diet products are often contradicted by advertisements for diet products within the same magazine.
Sex is frequently used to sell food. Many ads eroticize food and normalize bingeing. These ideas support dangerous eating-disordered behaviors.
There are many images in advertising that silence women — images that show women with their hands over their mouths and other visuals, as well as copy, that strip women of their voices.
The body language of young women and girls in advertising is usually passive and vulnerable. Conversely, the body language of men and boys is usually powerful, active, and aggressive.
When girls are shown with power in advertising, it is almost always a very masculine definition of power.
Often the power that women are offered in advertising is silly and trivial.
Women are often infantilized in advertisements, producing and reinforcing the sense that they should not grow up, resist becoming a mature sexual being, and remain little girls.
Advertisements rarely feature women over the age of 35, and there are many advertisements for beauty products that claim to help women continue to look young, even when they no longer are.
Increasingly, advertisements show women as victims of sexual harassment and violence.
Violence against women is normalized by advertisements.
Women live in a world defined by the threat of sexual violence and intimidation. The portrayal of women in advertising supports, rather than objects to, these threats.
Masculinity in advertising is often linked with violence, brutality and ruthlessness. Men are constantly portrayed as the perpetrators of violence.
Violence, hostility and dominance are often presented as erotic, attractive and appealing in advertising.

Given her critiques of the construction of femininity by the beauty industry, students could examine ads for cosmetics, clothes, diet products, etc., and have them define the discourses constituting the meaning of these ads. In our own research on high school students’ perceptions of stereotyped portrayals of females in magazine ads (Beach & Freedman, 1992), we found that students demonstrated little critical analysis of these ads. Moreover, when asked to create narratives associated with the people in the ads, for example, a female dressed in a Zum-Zum prom gown dancing with a sailor, students created highly idealized narratives, for example, that the couple will fall in love and get married. Students could examine how these ads influences their own gender perceptions as to what it means to be “female” or “male.”

Submissive females in advertising

Webquest: Images of Girls and Women
as Portrayed in the Media

Webquest: Carol Boehm: Images and Influences

Webquest: Dying to be Thin

Advertising geared for males focuses more on selling products—beer, cars, video games, clothes, sports, sports equipment, etc.—associated with male-peer bonding and markers of masculinity. For example, given the relatively high percentage of males playing video games, the video game industry is now placing more ads in the games. A study conducted by the industry itself (Activision and Nielsen Entertainment, 2004, “Video Game Habits: A Comprehensive Examination of Gamer Demographics and Behavior in U.S. Television Households,” and therefore possibly suspect in terms of bias toward promoting the idea of video game advertising) found that over one quarter of the gamers recalled ads from the last game they played, had positive perceptions of the ads, and one third indicated that the ads help them make purchase decisions.

One central theme of male-oriented ads is the appeal to the archetype of the muscular, tough, even violent male hero who takes on the world or the male sports star. These idealized images of masculinity engaged in “male” cultural practices are often associated with beer, car, or video game ads.

A Media Awareness Network instructional unit on male violence in advertising examines five basic themes evident in these ads:
1. Attitude is Everything
2. The Cave Man Mentality
3. The New Warriors
4. Muscles and the "Ideal Man"
5. Heroic Masculinity

Media Education Foundation video: Advertising and Male Violence

Media Education Foundation video: Tough Guise Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity
Featuring Jackson Katz
Part One: Understanding Violent Masculinity Introduction / Degendering Violence / Upping the Ante / Backlash / The Tough Guise
Part Two: Violent Masculinity in Action The School Shootings / Constructing Violent Masculinity / Violent Sexuality / Invulnerability / Vulnerability / Better Men

Study Guide

Media Awareness Network: Advertising and Male Violence

Media Awareness Network: Sports Personalities in Ads

Media Education Foundation video: Wrestling with Manhood Boys, Bullying & Battering
SECTIONS: Taking Wrestling Seriously / Happy & Escalating Violence / Making Men: Glamorizing Bullying / Homophobia & Constructing Heterosexuality / Divas: Sex & Male Fantasy / Normalizing Gender Violence / “It’s Only Entertainment”

Media Scope: Body Image and Advertising

Males in Ads (lots of useful examples)

Males as Objects (lots of useful examples of objectification of males)

Webquest: Ann Jones: Advertising and Image

Webquest: Jeff Bailey: Exploring Gender Stereotypes through Shakespeare

Webquest: How Do I Look?

For further reading: males and advertising

Boyreau, J. (2004). The Male Mystique: Men's Magazine Ads of the 1960s and '70s. New York: Chronicle.