The Objectification of Women in Advertisements
It is surprising to see that we are so accepting of advertisements and often not bothered at how strange they must look to us. A common theme seen in advertisements is the relation between men and women, and how they each gender is portrayed. For example, in advertising, according to Goffman, “the best way to understand the male/female relation is compare it to the parent/child relation in which men take on the roles of parents while women behave as children would be expected to.”
Thus, women are treated and seen basically as children. We often see in advertisements with women a common pose of finger to mouth which directly suggestive of children’s manners. Also, the common pose of women snuggling into the man similar to the way that children seek safety and consolation from their mothers.
An observation seen between gender relations is how often women and children are positioned on beds and floors, which is associated with less clean parts of a room; thus, those using them will be situated as subordinate to anyone who’s sitting or standing which is usually a man.
Another observation found between how each gender is displayed is how women are largely found to caress the object and lightly touch it, which may suggest that the women are always yearning for the object but cannot have complete power of it. In comparison we see men who are usually grasping, or manipulating the product.
So how come this doesn’t seem weird to us?
It is because advertisements draws its materials and ideas from the experiences of the audience and reformulates them in a distinctive way. According to Jhally, “It draws upon the same corpus of displays that we all use to make sense of social life.” Advertisements are neither false nor true mirror images of social reality because they are indeed part of social reality. Advertisements are part of the context where we attempt to comprehend and describe gender relations; thus, advertisements become part of the process in which we learn about gender. It is these conventionalized portrayals of gender that advertising bases much of their advertisements on.
But why is advertising so infatuated with gender and gender relations?
One reason is that gender is “one of our deepest and most important traits as human beings”, according to Jhally. We understand ourselves through individual identity, and gender is the key characteristics to defining ourselves as unique. Another reason that gender is used so frequently is that it can be communicated instantly. This is what advertisers love as they are able to communicate something that is instantly recognized that reaches the center of our identity.
This is the task that culture holds, for their job is make everyone fit. Society defines what a man is and what a woman is. It is a taboo to have an ambiguous gender, and there has been hysteria around characters that have had ill-defined gender identities. Society seems to have this requirement to strictly define the two to keep the system running. This is what advertisements support, and this is why they are so successful.
~ Leon
Reference:
Jhally, S. (n.d.) Advertising, gender, and sex: What’s wrong with a little objectification? Sut Jhally Website. Retrieved June 26, 2011, from http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/whatswrongwithalit/
