The Oppositional Gaze: On Advertising

The main goal of advertisements is to sell you whatever product or service the company is promoting. This goal is ruthless; it is blind to political correctness and in fact works to make you feel your absolute worst. As stated by Cortese, a successful advertisement increases your anxiety level and makes you think something is wrong with you as you are. The ad will then introduce a solution to you, which is (completely coincidentally of course,) their product or service (Cortese, 63). In the process of trying to dictate the attitudes, values and emotions of the audience, advertisements often marginalize, sexualize, and/or neglect groups that do not account for the intended audience. And the intended audience is always a young, white male, for he is the ideal spectator (Berger).

Gucci Ad
(Can you tell what they're selling? Are they selling us sex, or perfume?)

Advertisements sell us much more than their products.  They are also selling us ideas, perceived norms, values, and promises of a better life than we already have.  Ads have plenty to say about gender roles too.  “They are really projecting gender display –the ways in which we think women and men behave- not in the ways they actually do behave. Such portrayals or images are not reflective of social reality. In advertising, for example, women are primarily depicted as sexual objects or sexual agents,” (Cortese, 52). We see these depictions so often, we are desensitized to them, we overlook what is actually being implied, we passively accept that rail-thin models can sell us clothes and perfume and eating disorders, because they are the ideal. Kilbourne says “women are shown almost excluseively as housewives or sex objects,” and if you look at any print ad, billboard, or commercial, you will find that she isn’t wrong (Kilbourne, 122).

Because seemingly beautiful, happy women sell the product, it has become normalized to

Febreeze advertisement

sell the values that go alone with the images of these women. This is a dangerous territory for the consumer and viewer of these images, because advertisers have mastered our psyches. We can associate Febreeze and Pin Sol as lemon-fresh cleaners that our mothers will absolutely love. We think of Clean& Clear, Neutrogena, and Cover Girl when we think of beautiful, white, pore-less women with flawless skin and perfect symmetry. Calvin Klein, Tom Ford, and any other world-renowned designer you can think of sell you top of the line clothing, with a side of sex appeal (or is it vice versa?). We have, as a society, let these images define us, create our identities, our preferences, our values. And these images tell us that women are housewives or sex objects, nothing more.

1950s ad for beer,
depicting the stereotypical
brainless housewife

“The oppressive and draconian images of the ideal or perfect woman is hammered nearly continuously into countless little girls, adolescents, and women by the unrealistic representations in advertising,” (Cortese, 56). Women are not supposed to have more facets to them than you can see. “Women are allowed a mind or a body, but not both,” (Wolf, 59). We see this in advertisements, and that carries into our pop culture. Women that are sexualized are never seen in a different way, and the same is true of the housewife, the nerd, the lesbian, or any other label that can be placed on a woman. Of course advertisements have a hand in our popular culture because they finance much our popular culture. There are very few, if any, media outlets that can exist without the wallets of advertisers (Netflix and PBS, are a couple as we discussed in class).

And if you are a woman and a minority and/or a lesbian, life is even more difficult or you to be considered a consumer in the advertisement realm. Because lesbians are part of the “counter culture,” mainstream ads are not meant for their viewership. “Because lesbians have been taught to read the heterosexual possibilities of representations, the ‘straight’ reading is never entirely erased or replaced” (Clark, 146). Since advertisements dictate popular culture, and advertisements don’t depict homosexuality, it’s not far off to say that ads help in the “othering” of those who don’t fit the ideal image. The same could also be said of minority images- women of color and Asian women have essentially no place in ads or mainstream media.

Rosie the Riveter
(famous WW2 poster
encouraging women
to join the workforce)

It is difficult to say whether or not advertising will change its course to solve some of the issues of exclusion and constructed gender roles. While ad campaigns have strived to change the narrative for women towards empowerment recently, (often called “empowertising”) this still does not change the fact that the intended audience is narrower than the actual audience. A more improved version of these campaigns would include women that stray from the conventional notion of beauty (because even that is constructed by advertising, right?) and include a more diversified cast of women- men who identify as women, lesbian women, and women of all ethnicities, shapes and sizes. If these advertising campaigns cannot come forward, the best thing we can do is to keep exposing the facades created by the status quo of ads, the fakeness of it all and the destruction that advertising leaves in its wake.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1973. Print.

Clark, Danae, Henry Abelove, Michele Aina. Barale, and David M. Halperin. Commodity Lesbianism. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Cortese, Anthony Joseph Paul. "Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads: Sexism in Advertising." Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. 45-76. Print.

Kilbourne, Jean. "Beauty and the Beast of Advertising." Media & Values 1989: 121-25. Web.

Wolf, Naomi. "Culture." The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. 58-85. Print.