Advertising and Gender

Much of advertising to girls—as we saw in these articles—seemed to be geared toward preparing girls for their future roles as housewives, mothers, male ego-boosters, charming hostesses, shoppers, and self-effaced beauty queens. The articles were interesting but I found myself looking to outside sources to help me answer the questions for this post.

Looking at Wordles, Commercials, and Gender

I found the following blog which juxtaposes advertising to girls and advertising to boys using Wordles (Link: http://www.achilleseffect.com/2011/03/word-cloud-how-toy-ad-vocabulary-reinforces-gender-stereotypes/) . The author of this blog (Crystal Smith) and author of the book The Achilles Effect: What Pop Culture is Teaching Young Boys about Masculinity (2011) conducted a ‘mash-up’ of words that were used in commercial advertising to girls and boys. She extracted words that were included in toy commercials targeted at boys and girls ages 6-8. When words were repeated multiple times in a commercial she recorded them—she included these key words many times in her Wordles to show the weight associated with those particular words. There ended up being over 650 words from 27 different commercials targeted to boys and over 430 words from 32 commercials targeted to girls. The results reflected the authors' expectations:

Words associated with boyhood seemed to foster themes of: power, strength, competition, fighting, and activity.









In contrast, words associated with girlhood brought up themes of: love, the fine arts, parenthood, beauty, whimsical things, and passivity.



This helped me to think more about how advertising to boys seems to mirror many of the ideologies of a competitive capitalist free market and further illuminated the gendering of the sexes (i.e. Boyhood and Girlhood) which are starkly contrasted allowing for little or minimal overlap (or shared ownership) of words owned by girls and words owned by boys.



Advertising Fear and Sex

It seems that a lot of advertising fails to relate to 99.9% of women who experience things like—menstrual cramps, episodes of weight gain that can’t be cured with a simple panacea, and the daily frustration that comes with the stress of “trying to do it all”. I have found myself saying over the years: “your brand of ice cream is not the cure for my frustration or a fix for my painful breakup;” “your brand of diet pills are not a realistic solution to my weight gain--I’ve gained some weight because I’m older and my metabolism has started to slow down;” “your brand of tampon will definitely not fix my menstrual cramps and make me want to dance around the room in a pink skirt”.


I thought the reading on "Advertising" was particularly strong, as it discussed the selling of fear, fantasies, and lifestyles in advertising. It got me thinking about other—not necessarily gendered—forms of advertising and if they use the idea of fear and lifestyles as selling tactics? It seems that they do. Remember the Volvo Ad that positioned Volvo as the safe car? I guess in a way through its safety association it also got labeled the safe mom car, which further seems to be selling a gendered lifestyle as well as fear. So this one isn't really genderless. Moreover, Long Island Trust had an Ad that scared people living in Long Island, NY from banking with a city bank. They carried the positioning slogan: “The city is a great place to visit, but would you want to bank there?” (Ries and Trout 197). These are old but nevertheless classic examples. This latter example is certainly less gendered than the first and it also shows how forms of fear advertising are used with many different purposes in mind (i.e. this ad seems to be aimed more at class identities, your money is not in the saftest hands because the wealthy citizens of Manhattan--not you--are this bank's no. 1 concern).

Why is it that so many liquor bottles look like they should be walking down a catwalk or riding a tall black horse alongside the Marlboro man? Because they are selling a lifestyle or an image of feminine/masculine identity. Both genders seem to be equally prone to this advertising strategy. It seems that the main difference in advertising targeted at men is a use of sex appeals. Maciejewski’s study in 2004 on the ethics of fear and sexual appeals in advertising found that college age “women were opposed to the use of sexual appeals, whether or not they were idealist or relativists” and “men were in favor of sexual appeals” (Mayfield). As far as fear appeals were concerned both genders were tolerant. This was an interesting find—which I think speaks more to the—psychology of the male/female gender dichotomy as socially constructed and the female as the passive icon of an active male desire more than anything else (Mulvey 62-65). It would be interesting to conduct a study like this with a more diverse group of people of many ages, ethnicities, and income and education levels to see how the results might change (if at all).




Supplemental References


Ries, Al, and Jack Trout. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Print.



¹ The study results were actually extracted from an individual web posting on Yahoo! Voices. I would have cited them but I couldn’t find a free version of the article. Here’s the actually study these study results were taken from:


Jeffrey J. Maciejewski, “Is the Use of Sexual and Fear Appeals Ethical? A Moral Evaluation by Generation Y College Students.” Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising 26 (2004), 97-105.