Domestic Women and "Real Men": The World of Advertising

A few weeks ago as I was watching TV, a Bank of America commercial came on. In the commercial, different customers are talking about Bank of America's reward programs. What struck me about the commerical is that about halfway through, there is a man at a grocery store with a baby strapped to him in a carrier, talking about how Bank of America customers get rewards even for buying groceries. I applaud Bank of America for this; in most other commercials, that baby-carrying grocery shopper would have been a woman. Because, according to commericals, men never do anything domestic.

I have been complaining for some time now that almost all commercials for household chore products feature a woman doing those chores. (I say "almost all" as a buffer, but in reality, I have never seen a commercial in which a man is cleaning. They might exist, though.) It was well known that women have long been getting annoyed at how the media portrays us. However, it isn't just women that advertisements pigeonhole; it happens to men, too.

Think back to any cleaning commercial you can remember. Who is it that's smiling because the product made it easy to clean her windows? A woman. Who is looking contentedly at her newly-cleaned floor? A woman (with MR. Clean for company, no less!). Who does the laundry and makes the kids' lunch? Who is giving the baby a bath with the gentle new baby wash? It's always a woman. Why do commercials continue to banish women back to television mom of the 1950's? This, I think, is offensive to both men and women. Not only does it say that women always have to be the cleaners and caretakers, but it seems to say that men are incapable of doing these things. Men clean. I know they do. I've seen it happen plenty of times!

Here's an experiment: do a Google image search for advertisements or commercials for any well-known cleaning product or tool (e.g., Swiffer advertisement, Lysol commercial). How many pictures of men do you come up with? Probably not very many.

There is a whole other series of gender-offensive advertisements: beer commercials. Do a Google image search of "Beer commercials." Go ahead. Sure, there are women, but they certainly aren't drinking beer. There are men drinking beer, though. Also, oddly enough, when I did that search there were three pictures of babies with beer, but the women were just bending over, or suggestively holding a beer bottle.

Concerning the commercials for beer, there is a rampant practice of shoving masculinity down men's throats in order to get them to drink that particular brand of beer. Take the Milwaukee's Best Light beer commercials, for example, in which a man is crushed with a giant can of beer for doing such unmanly things as interacting with a cute dog, calling his partner to check in, or even using a napkin to soak grease off of a piece of pizza. Because, remember guys, real men have heart attacks. The tagline was, "Men should act like men, and light beer should tasted like beer." These commercials aired in 2005, and were popular enough to cause the company to launch another campaign, in which men were crushed with 6-packs of beer for being unmanly.

Miller Lite also recently ran a series of similar commercials. In these, a man goes up to the bar and orders a light beer from an attractive female bartender (there's a different bartender in each ad). She asks him if he cares how it tastes, and he responds with some form of "no" (because, really, who does care how anything tastes?). She then insults his masculinity by pointing out his purse, skinny jeans, skirt, etc. So the message is "If you don't drink our beer, you are not manly, and therefore do feminine things."

These commercials are offensive to men because they construct absurdly strict gender roles, and they are offensive to women because the insult paid to men is that by their actions they are being lesser men, and therefore, womanly. How many make-up commercials do you see telling women to wear a certain brand of make-up, or else they'll look manly?

So, who is to blame for these simple-minded commercials? Are the advertising companies really out to reinforce gender stereotypes? Probably not. Advertisements have exactly one goal in mind: to make money. They do this by playing on established norms and preconceptions, and by preying on our desires and insecurities (think anti-aging cream and Viagra commercials). They usually only have one picture, or less than a minute to work with, so they have to use whatever people will react most quickly to. They aren't in the business of social change because, in most cases, risk is not lucrative.

Really, then, it is us viewers who are to blame. Like anything else that is made to be widely read or viewed, these ads are made because they work. There is an accepting audience, so why should they change? They change when audience changes, because certain tactics no longer work. We who care about gender equality need to show companies why they should change their advertising strategies. Be the audience that changes so that commercials will change with you. Boycott companies with offensive advertisements; better yet, write to those companies and tell them why you are boycotting. You might think that one, or only a handful of people can't do much, but doing a little is better than doing nothing at all.