Everyone’s heard the line ‘every girl wants to be her and every man wants to be with her’. It seems to be a central theme to pretty much any modern billboard ad or magazine cover. Gender advertising is hugely popular because we identify with it so well and it’s so easy for us to perceive the differences between male and female roles. These ‘roles’ have been created by culture, conventionalized by advertisers, and now provide us with a hyper-ritualistic sense of what we should try to be.
The views on gender imaging in advertising have not always been agreed upon by all critics; the feminist view frequently reverts to objectification while Goffman called gender ads ‘commercial realism’. He said that advertisers use models of gender relations from everyday life to connect to the consumer, which defines the basic essentials of what it means for him or her to be an individual. In doing so, they are able to produce ads that live up to these prototypes that culture and society have created and thus give us something to relate to in their world.
It may, at times, be objectifying and portraying something that isn’t necessarily real, but what if advertising didn’t exist at all? Well, we would not be subjected to this huge market of decisions that constantly tries to woo us into buying one of hundreds of products that we probably won’t ever use. There definitely would be no competition between brands, which means that there would be much more truth in ads, doesn’t it? People could show their individuality to a greater extent by not having the influence of the market forcing them to dress a certain way, right? And we certainly wouldn’t have to put up with commercials in the most suspenseful scenes of Grey’s Anatomy. Now wouldn’t that be just phenomenal?
Then why do we have all this advertising? Better yet, how has it been able to be so successful? Answer: sponsorship of the TV shows we watch, funding of all of our favourite hockey and basketball teams, the whole entertainment industry…need I say more? Every show is ‘brought to you in part by’ or ‘is sponsored by’ advertising. By forcing their way into the shows that we watch on a weekly basis, ads have a huge power in controlling the media. No advertising means no entertainment, no newscasts, no sporting events, and no fun.
In a world of 6 billion people (and growing), chances of being the only person with the same thoughts or views on the whole planet are pretty slim. So even though we know that there is nothing real about how comfortable and easy to walk in the new Steve Madden stilettoes are, about how good and healthy that McDonald’s hamburger looks in the picture, or about how you have to have a Blackberry to be part of the in crowd, we still go for it and buy all of those things. Why? Because reality sucks. Ads create this magical world of illusion that makes reality seem fun and carefree and exciting, when we all know that it’s mostly just work, worries, and taxes. As Ellen Willis, journalist and political theorist, once said, fantasy is more flexible than reality. As a result, it lets us imagine, it lets us dream, and it lets us live in a world where reality is the flawless size 0 Covergirl and the incredibly buff Abercrombie & Fitch model. So go ahead, step into that world every once in a while and enjoy it for what it appears to be.
SoLetMeEntertainYou 