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Essays on gender portrayal in advertising
Essays on gender portrayal in advertising
The effect of stereotypes in advertising on society
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For my research project, I decided to examine gender in magazines, which led me to question, “How gender is depicted in magazine ads?” I feel that this topic is important as it gives us an insight into how advertisers use factors like gender and sexuality in order to target a certain audience. This is sociologically important as the ads could reveal more information about gender roles and the way in which the audience of the ads perceive gender.
Literature Review
In order to help substantiate my research, I turned to various academic sources by researching online databases. Liezille Jacobs and Tia Tyree (2013) researched alcohol advertisements and reviewed the ways in which they constructed sex, gender, and race (Jacobs and Tyree 2013, p.5793). They found that alcohol related content was far more prevalent in the South African magazines, with Cosmopolitan (SA) containing 139 alcohol advertisements and 66 editorials related to alcohol competitions or promotions, True Love had 83 alcohol advertisements and 45 editorials related to alcohol competitions or promotions (2013:5795). Comparatively, there were 56 editorials on alcohol in the U.S. version of Cosmopolitan (2013:5795). In addition, Jacobs and Tyree found that Essence magazine depicted Black men and Black women who were of the sporty and causal type while both versions of Cosmopolitan and True Love depicted White men and White women in a more sexual manner (2013:5796). Plus, they found that women more often than not had the role of a passive sex symbol in sexual advertisements (Jacobs and Tyree 2013, p. 5800). Jang-Sun Hwang, Juran Kim, Guihok Lee, Carolyn McMahan, and Roxanne Hovland used a similar approach to Jacobs and Tyree and found that U.S. advertisements were more lik...
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...In American and Korean Advertisements.” Sex Roles 53 (11/12): 887-899
Jacobs, Liezille and Tia Tyree. .“The Construction of Femininity Race, and Sexuality in Alcohol Advertisements in South African and American Women’s Magazines.” Gender & Behavior 11.2: 5788-5803.
Ki-Young, Lee and Sung-Hee Joo. “The Portrayal of Asian Americans In Magazine Ads: An Update.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 82 (3): 654-671
O’Connor, P.J. and Gary Sullivan. “Women’s Role Portrayals in Magazine Advertising: 1958-1963.” Sex Roles 18 (3/4): 181-188
Shaw, Ping and Yue Tan. “Race and Masculinity: A Comparison of Asian and Western Models in Men's Lifestyle Magazine Advertisements.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 91 (1): 118-138
Teftt, Bruce, Chris Tysiaczny, and Megan Vokey. “An Analysis of Hyper-Masculinity in Magazine Advertisements.” Sex Roles 68 (9/10): 562-576
The requirement for a particular look and sound that is in conjunction with the white, upwardly mobile consumer base of corporate America, is pitted as a significant attempt at creating ‘new normals’ by mainstream mass media. In the process of casting diversity, aspects of constructing minorities and ethnicities as normal are brought to the foreground, with several instances pinpointing towards issues of ethnic stereotyping, miscegenation and racial naturalization. Even with increasing visibility of Asian Americans as consumers, talent and corporate professionals, their scope and representation, both linguistic and visual, are deeply coded by what would be understood as natural by economically mobile, middle class, white American standards. The concluding section of the book reflects upon the significance of sites of advertisement placements from broadcast media to digital and social media platforms, factoring in issues of audience testing and reactions, to indicate the shifting dynamics of creative power and knowledge production between Asian American and general market
Stephenson, T., Stover, W. J., & Villamor, M. (1997). Sell Me Some Prestige! The Portrayol of Women in Business-Related Ads. Journal of Popular Culture, 255-271.
Advertising, whether criticized or celebrated, is undeniably a strong force in American society. Portrayals and Images of women have long been used to sell in published advertisements. However, how they have been used has changed enormously throughout the decades. Women have fought to find a lasting and prominent position in their society. Only in the span of twenty years, between 1900’s and 1920’s, the roles of women changed dramatically here in United States.
Merskin, D (2004) Reviving Lolita? : A Media Literacy Examination of Sexual Portrayals of Girls in Fashion Advertising. In American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 48: pp.119-129. London: Sage Publications.
Within the beauty industry there are numerous examples of media propaganda that can be investigated, but the television and magazine industry privdes a very specific representation of what women experience daily through the media. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the ...
Through content analysis Shome addresses how white women are often shown in a soft light, making them glow angelically. White women are also usually incredibly beautiful, usually tall, fit, and middle or upper class when photographed for advertisement purposes. This research attempts to explain why white women are seen universally as global
Carrie Packwood Freeman and Debra Merskin are the authors of “Having it his Way: The Construction of Masculinity in Fast-Food TV Advertising”. They describe how fast food restaurants across America use masculinity in their commercials to target the male population and get them to buy their food. Although I concede that fast food restaurants do use masculinity to target the male population, I also insist that they are also used to target the female population of America as well. The masculinity not only appeals to the male population, but the female population as well. In the article, Freeman and Merskin analyze commercials for six different fast food restaurants that use masculinity to sell the idea of their food being good and manly.
Advertising in American culture has taken on the very interesting character of representing our culture as a whole. Take this Calvin Klein ad for example. It shows the sexualization of not only the Calvin Klein clothing, but the female gender overall. It displays the socially constructed body, or the ideal body for women and girls in America. Using celebrities in the upper class to sell clothing, this advertisement makes owning a product an indication of your class in the American class system. In addition to this, feminism, and how that impacts potential consumer’s perception of the product, is also implicated. Advertisements are powerful things that can convey specific messages without using words or printed text, and can be conveyed in the split-second that it takes to see the image. In this way, the public underestimates how much they are influenced by what they see on television, in magazines, or online.
In the essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” author and philosopher Susan Bordo discusses the history and current state of male representation in advertisements. While using her feminist background, Bordo compares and contrasts the aspects of how men and women are portrayed in the public eye. She claims that there has been a paradigm shift the media with the theory that not just women are being objectified in the public eye, but also men too. Since the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Calvin Klein commercials, men have started to become more dehumanized and regarded as sex symbols. In a similar fashion to how Bordo describes gender, race plays a similar role in the media. People of all different ethnicities and cultures are being categorized into an oversimplified and usually unfair image by the media over basic characteristics.
Advertising surrounds the world every second of the day. This form of influence has had the power to influence how society views gender roles ever since men and women began to appear in advertisements. Through the exposure to many different gender portrayals in advertising, gender roles become developed by society. This stems from how men and women are depicted, which forms stereotypes regarding the individual roles of men and women. People often shift their definition of an ideal image towards what they see in advertisements. From this, they tend to make comparisons between themselves and the advertisement models. Advertisements tend to be brief, but impactful. The different portrayals of men and women in advertising show that advertisements
Vanessa Hazell and Juanne Clarke. “Race and Gender in the Media: A Content Analysis of Advertisements in Two Mainstream Black Magazines.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Sep., 2008), pp. 5-21
The Tiger Beer advertisement shown in the appendix is a clear example of the objectification of women in advertising. The Tiger Beer advert was made to appeal to men from the age of 20 to 60. The advert seeks to get a cheap laugh from the target audience with the image of the woman in a sexual pose and the picture of the beer. The ad promotes the idea that beer is the most desirable thing in the ‘Far East’ and that beer is much more important than women. It also openly laughs at the South East Asian sex trade by putting a prostitute in the middle of the ad. The ad also implies that women in the ‘Far East’ are only good for sex (dressing in revealing, sexual clothes designed to make the woman in the ad seem more desirable).
Most photos and titles draw in the male gaze, with female bodies half-naked paired with ‘Ladies love this!’. Pairing these particular items together creates an atmosphere which reinforces male expectations and norms to their audience. GQ, while appearing as a harmless fashion magazine, sends out a number of subconscious messages to their viewers of what it means to be a well-respected, successful male in today’s world. Gentlemen Quarterly, like many other magazines, implements the gender binary into its readers through its advertisements and articles.
4) Kilbourne, Jean. Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women. Dir. Sut Jhally. DVD. Media Education Foundation, 2000.
Lundstrom, William J., and Donald Sciglimpaglia. "Sex Role Portrayals in Advertising."Journal of Marketing 41.3 (1977): 72