Exploring Gender in America's Advertising
Be Like This: An Exploration of Gender in American Advertising
by Erica Boehme
In this essay I will try to do the impossible: to unravel the secret mystery that is Gender in American advertising. This topic in and of itself is difficult because of the many tiny encoded meanings, values, and the accepted and assumed gender stereotypes of the consumers who will experience these advertisements. I have chosen the topic of Gender in spite of what I consider to be a daunting job if fully attempted, though here will only follow a minimal sample of what could be said, and I have chosen it for two main reasons; the first, for myself to try to experience these advertisements in both objective and non-objective ways, and secondly, because the topic of Gender itself is one that spans every race, creed, region, conflict, and continent, and will never be dislocated from the very basic fibre of human biology and psychology. To expand, growing up in a female-filled house, both with strong male and female role models, and very little contact with the highly encoded and influential world of 1980s advertising and popular visual culture, I was given the luxury of deciding who I was, what I liked and thought, and the type of person I would become with minimal reference to the type of specific gender expectations that advertising would have bestowed upon me. It is mainly, I believe, though the process of interpellation that this referencing takes place between the advertisement and the viewer(s). Each image, word, or sound in an advertisement, or in any aspect of visual culture, has been placed there for a reason. It is these reasons behind the ads, and their potential outcomes according to what they signify, their contexts, possible meanings and viewers that I will explore in the following pages. And now, a word from our sponsor.
Image
It is possible to say that with privilege, comes responsibility. And above all, the world of image production has the greatest responsibility of all. Sight is the human sense which can be exploited day after day and bombarded with images that unconsciously seep into our everyday lives. The sight of cigarette advertisements near schools could to be blamed for a rise in that school’s adolescent smoking statistic because it puts teenagers in mind continuously of this consumer product that they should want (according to the cigarette manufacturer, of course). A television playing Barney videos in a paediatric waiting room could almost automatically send a child into fits wanting this or that Barney toy. And the constant television advertisement of diamond jewellery near Valentine’s Day makes thousands of otherwise practical women realise that they want such things, whether they can afford it or not. But images also taken the part of telling us as the consumer who we should be, what we should look like, how we should act and interact, and exactly what we want to buy, though we haven’t seen it yet.
I have included two such advertising images with this essay. The first, a Coca-Cola ad from the 1950s depicting a warm, happy home with seated son, and loving, attentive mother, seeing to her son’s needs for refreshment. I chose this image for its representation of the post-war values and expectations of specific consumers, and the ideological advertising world in which those values existed for every consumer. I believe this image, hereafter referred to as Figure1, gives a view of the post WWII advertising boom which saw that the rise in an economically stable middle class meant a greater desire for choice and variety in consumer goods, thus resulting in the need for a higher class of advertising.
The second image, hereafter referred to as Figure 2, comes from the advertising archives of the Calvin Klein fragrance “One.” I chose this image for its portrayal of modern twenty-first century youths the way that the advertising world wants them to be. With the semi-aggressive stance and half-naked appearance of these young people, it is little wonder that the rest of the world could see America as violent and immoral. It is this type of image that appears in teen magazines on almost every other page. It is this type of image that young people are bombarded with on billboards, street corners and television. Again, it is little wonder that so many youths in America are becoming statistics of eating disorders, aggression, and premature sexual behaviour.
Representation and Sign
Everyday the ever consuming American workforce sees examples of representation in everything they do. According to Sturken and Cartwright in their text “Practices of Looking”, representation can be termed as “the act of portraying, depicting, symbolising, or presenting the likeness of something.” If we accept this loose definition, then everything around us can be seen as representations of something else. T-shirts, books, buildings, storefronts, food, hairstyles, almost anything, can be made into a representation of a thing that is other from its original, and indicative of something completely different. Figure1 itself is the perfect conceptual representation of a 1950s comfortable, middle-class living room or den. The image does not try to actually be that room or situation, but only to provide a visual portal through which a situation can be seen that the consumers could place themselves in, and feel comfortable in doing so. For example, the representation in Figure 1 of the easy chair, complete with pillow and “man’s best friend” allows the consumer to be reminded of their own living room and family pet, and perhaps that thought follows through to the subject of the advertising, in this case the drink Coca-Cola. It is this thought process that the producers of advertisement hope will lead the consumer to buy their intended product. But Figure 1 also gives the consumer a representation of the expected roles of sons and mothers in the 1950s. The son, presumably on furlough, or military leave, reclines in a chair playing with the family dog, while his mother welcomes him home by fluffing the pillow behind his head, and perhaps providing him a refreshing Coca-Cola. Here we have to start believing in the actuality of the representation. Does this image give the consumer a truthful representation of the gender roles and relations between all middle class mothers who have sons home on leave? The image in Figure 1 asks its reader to trust in it through its wording, “Have a ‘Coke’ = You’re home again…or how to welcome sons on furlough.” It is through the process of interpellation that this advertisement works. Interpellation invites the consumers to place themselves in the fictional world of the advertisement, and in doing so, tries to convince the consumer that this is the way they themselves should be and act. It comes down to social pressure. Show a person what everyone else is doing, and inevitably, they will be interested in doing it too.
The representation which occurs in Figure 2, the CK One fragrance advertisement, is one that we as consumers expect to see in advertisements, but perhaps not necessarily in the actuality of everyday life. In viewing this image, I believe that its representation of gender is subtler than that of Figure 1 in that it shows the essence of gender in a more psychological and stereotypical light. The consumer sees the young males in Figure 2 as argumentative, possibly as aggressive, which is stereotypical of the male psyche and accepted social behaviour for young males of the twenty-first century. The females in the image portrayed by Figure 2 seem to be arguing as well, but with attitude, as opposed to aggression. An attitude problem is socially acceptable for young females in the twenty-first century. The representation of the youths in Figure 2 as half-dressed, argumentative teens with an attitude problem can hardly fail to impress the younger consumer, thus encouraging them to buy this fragrance, but also to create yet another image rift between the younger and older generations. But who needs to pay attention to them, anyway…they’re too young to know much of anything.
Sign as defined by Sturken and Cartwright can be expressed as “the relationship between a vehicle of meaning such as a word, image, or object and its specific meaning in a particular context.” This means making a perfect marriage between such a word, image, or object in order to produce the desired outcome of meaning. The concept of sign goes hand in hand with the concept of representation; the one placing meaning on certain stereotypes or genders in their certain situations, while the other represents these situations in a manner which we as consumers can relate to in an effort to make us associate ourselves with the product each advertisement is promoting. And in the end, we break down and buy, as the good little consumers we are.
Viewers, Contexts and Meanings
Once advertisements are placed in front of people to look at, or any type of visual culture, for that matter, those people begin to produce meaning depending on their own processes of decoding the image, it’s context, and the personal views and beliefs of the viewers themselves. And gender factors into each of these instances to either assist or hinder the viewer in determining the meaning of the image.
First and foremost, the initial visual message will depend on the sex of the viewer. I say “sex” and not “gender” because they are two different things and should be treated as such. The biologically dichotomising term “sex” refers to the binary system of physicality in the human species, with the occasional rarity of hermaphrodites, or those who are born with the apparatus of both the male and the female sex. The term “gender” is a socially devised term and a way of defining the expectations and culturally accepted standards that apply to each sex separately. It is because of this differentiation that advertising can help economic markets to thrive. Images are encoded by their producers with messages for, about, and specific to an ideological viewer. The image in Figure 1, for instance, may have been encoded for the middle class, white, suburban mother catering to the needs and desires of her family. Such an ideological viewer would certainly have seen such an advertising image in a magazine such as “Good Housekeeping” or “The Saturday Evening Post,” and been seduced by the home situation in the image reminiscent of their own, deciding to buy this product over another.
The same advertising image seen by a male in the same socio-economic situation might have elicited thoughts of dissatisfaction with his family situation if it was not like the fictional world of the image. These differences in thought patterns between the male and female consumer are created at skin-level by the cultural standards that are set by the society around these consumers. And the images of visual culture use this power of portrayal of cultural stands to make the view feel that their world should exhibit the same qualities as that of the world of the image.
In the case of Figure 2, the obvious representation of teen angst-driven aggression can be seen as rebellion and looked at favourably by the young consumer wishing to distance themselves from the older “parent” generation. The young female viewer in particular could see this image while flipping through her fashion magazine, and view it as a positive example of female expression, considering the portrayal of two of the females as outspoken, strong-looking individuals who are not afraid to show off their bodies. The meaning she might take from this image is one of strong, healthy, lively and street-smart individuals who wear this fragrance, therefore making her want to wear the same fragrance in the hope of getting the same results in life. She is the ideal female viewer. A bit of a subconscious reading, perhaps, but it is by that simple subconscious process that meanings are portrayed through visual culture.
A self-assured female viewer finding this image in a store checkout line might view it with disgust, seeing the half-naked portrayal of attitude-infused youths as a degrading look at what society thought teens acted and looked like. She may decode this image the way the producers meant it to have been decoded, but she, unlike the female previous viewer, does not accept the social stereotypes of gender portrayal pictured here. This viewer might make the meaning from this image that the males need to calm down and just talk, and the females need to cut the attitude or cheer up, and all need to put their clothes back on. This is not the indented ideological viewer and will rarely buy into this advertisement and its fragrance, unless presented to her in a totally different manner of image.
The self-conscious young male viewing this image could see the picture itself first as worthy of attention because of the amount of female skin it shows, thus immediately succumbing to one of the biggest socially accepted stereotypes of young males, that they are driven only by physical pleasure and sex. This male viewer might also see males in this image as praiseworthy because of their physical stature, and strive to look like them, even though this could mean eating disorders, and physical difficulties from overexertion in exercising. This youth takes meaning from the image not only in the sense that he may buy this fragrance because it could help him to have this up-beat lifestyle, but that he has allowed himself to be influenced by the more subtle social constructs of the image, telling him; “Be Like This.” The self-assured young man could simply see Figure 2 for what it is an engineered photograph of models who bear little resemblance to the everyday male, and will probably not buy this product, unless it is presented to him in a very different manner.
Should we “Be Like This”?
With images of visual culture and advertising everywhere we look, it is hard to claim any true resistance to the fictional world that these images create for us as viewers and consumers. We are influenced, in spite of ourselves, by everything around us, for better or for worse. Of course as the individual viewers and decoders of meaning that we are, and depending on the contexts and formats of the images, and our own personal outlooks on life, we will each make our own meanings. We will take from any image exactly what we want to take away from it, though we may be induced to buy the product anyway. There is no way to stop this infiltration of our brains and value systems, as we go about our meaning (full/less, choose one) lives. But we still have a choice. Should we really “Be Like This,” or Be Ourselves? Only time, and the images we encounter, will tell.
Marling, K, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s, Harvard University Press, 1994
Melosh, B, Gender and American History Since1890, Routledge, 1992
Sturken, M, and Cartwright, L, Practices of Looking, Oxford Press, 2001
Twitchell, J, Adcult USA, Columbia University Press, 1996
Williamson, J, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Boyars,1983