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Sex, Housework & Ads
http://www.womenswire.com/forums/image/d1022/
by Mary Peacock
Fall '98: Fashion seems to undergo a reality check. Stilettos out, flats in. Elastic skirts out, soft skirts in. Tight jackets out, chic sweaters in. And, even more revolutionary, real women in Anne Klein and other fashion ads. The first September Vogue in history that didn't have a supermodel on the cover. Granted, the magazine showed a movie star, but Renee Zellweger is not a conventional beauty. Maybe fashion images are getting, dare we say it, more real?
Don't count on it. A recent 10-year study of magazine fashion ads showed an increasing amount of female body exposure and of women shown in "low-status positions (i.e. subservient to men). The only improvement was more black women in "white" fashion magazines, though they wore a disproportionatenumber of animal-print outfits.
The first study of racial bias in advertising, in 1953, found that only .06% of magazine ads showed African-Americans, and 95.3% of those were portrayed as unskilled laborers; the rest were athletes and entertainers.
The first serious look -- thanks to the women's movement -- at the image of females in advertising wasn't until 1971. Market researchers found that magazine ads reflected four stereotypes:"A woman's place is in the home";"Women do not make important decisions or do important things";"Women are dependent on men and need their protection";"Men regard women primarily as sex objects -- they are not interested in them as people."
But that's all history, right? Ha!
Since the 1950s, many fewer blacks in ads are servants and laborers -- but many more are athletes and entertainers. Or recipients of charity. One is still hard-pressed to find nonfamous, middle-class blacks equivalent to the middle-class whites seen in most consumer advertisements.
The percent of blacks in ads has risen but it's never reached demographic parity, and has actually dropped since the early 1980s.
The image of women has undergone a similar sleight of hand. Lots of movement but not much meaningful change. Women get out of the house now, but in the last 25 years there has been a 60% increase in females shown purely as decorative objects. Although the images are updated, these days they're often as close to porn and irrelevant to the product as the old '50s cliche of a half naked pinup girl straddling a wrench on an auto-parts calendar.
Saatchi and Saatchi, an international ad agency, polled women in 1996 to see if they were still unhappy about how they were portrayed in ads. The answer was Yes. We felt, in effect, that the message had merely changed from making women fear that their houses were dity to making them fear being unattractive or old.
In 1997, Advertising women of New York started an awards ceremony called the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A 1998 "Good" went, for example, to Kellogg's Special K, which dumped a campaign featuring a size 2 model admiring herself in front of a mirror in favor of a "reshape your attitude" theme -- this included a TV spot showing men in a bar saying things like "I will stop asking, 'Do I look fat in this?'" The '98 "Grand Ugly" went to Del Taco for promoting its Macho Combo Burrito with a commercial in which a woman wearing an extremely small bikini runs down the beach in slow motion while the announcer murmurs, "if this is your idea of quality entertainment...have we got something for you."
Sometimes, though, the shoe is on the other foot. In 1997, some "girl power"- inspired ads in Britain using images of violence against men became a cause celebre. Wallis, a women's clothier, did a series of magazine ads showing men about to be killed for staring at women -- for example, a gent about to have his throat cut because his barber is distracted by a pretty girl. Lee jeans caught the worst flack for a poster of a woman resting her stiletto on a mans bare butt, with the line "Put the boot in."
Men were appalled, women criticized the company for fueling the stereotype of spiteful women, and Lee said it was just a jokey ad for boot-cut pants.
