Words: 2057
Consumer minds’ can be changed, opinions molded. I believe advertising in the media today is slightly changing, however will not drastically change. The commercials and advertisements still implant the usual gender roles to our society today. Will the media ever change? The methodology used was researching, analyzing, and observing magazine ads, plus watching commercials for a full three hours to help In exposing the advertising in the media and how it seems to characterize our society today. Commercials are a way that gender roles are displayed in society.
When you see a car commercial for a mechanic most of the time the mechanic is a man. But when you see a commercial about cleaning products for the house, normally a woman is the face you see. In other words, the media can help break the barriers on how gender roles are portrayed in society. The more those women represent strength on television; it will then encourage them to build their own self-confidence. In review of the television viewing of women and men, it is easy to forget that the hours they spend watching television are a substantial part of each week.
Excluding hours spent sleeping, women spend approximately 1 hour out of every 4 hours of each day watching television. Men, not far behind, spend about 1 hour out of every 5 hours of each day watching television (Butler 1980). In general, these concentrated views of manhood suggest the many ways in which advertising negatively affects men by narrowing the definition of what it means to be a man in American society. Upon re-viewing the advertisements and commercials, I realized how much the role of the strong, silent, authoritarian, militaristic and threatening male pervades societal ideals.
Although it’s neither realistic nor a positive role to emulate, it also shapes men’s views of themselves and how they measure up to masculine role models. Images of men influence the gender role attitudes that men express soon after exposure to the images. Ads and commercials, with their images of cowboys, successful businessmen, construction workers, sophisticates in tuxedos, muscle men and others, advertisements may seem to be flashing by casually. But they actually represent countless] if often unconscious decisions by writers, advertisers, producers, programmers and others about what men look like, say and even think.
Men view magazine advertisements containing images Of men that varied in terms of how traditionally masculine versus neutral they were and whether the models ere the same ate or much older than the viewers. This suggests that nontraditional men’s gender role attitudes may be rather unstable and susceptible to momentary influences such as those found in advertising. Several parts of relationships are viewed differently by the sexes. “Men view women as lower on the socioeconomic scale, while women see the two genders as at equal level on the socioeconomic scale” (Melville and Cornish, 1993).
When studying the many different commercials these two commercials definitely supported the main type of male role in advertising. Coca-Cola ran an ad in which at a certain time all of the women in an office shed to the window to watch a construction worker take his shirt off and drink a Diet Coke. Although he is undressing, the situation allows us to assume that he will not reach full nudity. Another good example opens with two women sitting in a park eating lunch. They are guessing whether the passing men are wearing briefs or boxers.
Michael Jordan walks buy in a tight fitting shirt and a nice suit and says “They’re Haines. Let’s leave it at that. ” Once again the media displays males as the “breadwinners”, and efficiently renders women as inferior. These images largely reflect traditional patriarchal notions Of gender. And although times have changed, Our country’s society was built on these (patriarchal) concepts. Social constructionist beliefs not only mold the media, but also forge advertisements into common stereotypes. A person ‘s environment has a big influence on the roles deemed accurately for men and women.
Media also plays an important role in the colonization process for your and old people. Gender roles are as apparent in movies and television sitcoms, as they are in commercials. While observing the commercials throughout the three hours, the sitcoms in between those commercials showed the typical gender roles. However, there were others hat flipped the stage. Observed commercials that showed on the mother goes to work and the father stays home with the child, yet the catch was when she arrived back home she found the house a mess.
This portrayed that the father wasn’t able to handle the housework or child at the same time as the mother can. Furthermore, the media seems to attempt to establish commercials to switch the gender roles; however they’re creating mixed images. Advertisements also have the possibility to encourage both positive and negative effects on people, especially on women. In fact, most advertisements use women to promote the product. Often, food is related to women in advertisements. In many of these commercials, the woman is not only rewarding herself, she is also coping with her disappointment at being unappreciated.
The ideal women, according to these magazines, are passive and dependent. Her fate and her happiness rest with a man, not with the participation in the labor force. Advertisers often offer food as a way to repress irritation, resentment, and hurt feelings. Although it has been seen that women are generally portrayed in roles that show them to be subservient to men in television drama (and even children’s television and orators), it is in advertising that television is most backward in comparison with society’s attitudes, and also where the most click??d stereotypes exist.
A unflattering comment from Jean Kilojoules (1999) probably sums up a lot of adverts; “Scientific studies and the most casual viewing yield the same conclusion: Women are shown almost exclusively as housewives or sex objects” We are, according to Kilojoules (1 999), subjected to “over 1 500 ads a day, constituting perhaps the most powerful educational force in society”. With this knowledge, it is even more worrying then that women are represented so badly in advertisements. Some might say that images of women on television and in other media have improved in recent years.
To a limited extent this is true, because in some serials, women do play strong and intelligent roles. In most shows, however, men are still the major characters and women are cast as glamorous objects, scheming villains, or servants; and, for every contemporary show that includes more positive images of women, there are numerous others in which women are shown as either sidekicks of men, sexual objects, or helpless imbeciles (Anderson 2003). “Advertising is our environment” (Kilojoules 1999).
Kilojoules hit it on the nose; advertising s part Of our environment. It’s all over the place, buses, signs, books, magazine, you name it’s being advertised. We cannot escape it. Kilojoules (1999) also states, “The average American is exposed to at least three thousand ads every day and will spend three years of his or her life watching television commercials. ” When analyzing and observing the magazine advertisements it seems like most of the ads only focused on sex. Is that the only thing these advertisers want us to focus on?
You see the Calvin Klein Perfume ad with a woman and men in a sexual position and half dressed, even foods are being promoted in a sexual way. Is this the type of imagine you want to give young adults or teens? These types of advertisements lead to mishaps to our society. “Sex-role colonization has many sources, the most important if which are parents, teachers, siblings, and peers. In addition to these primary sources, the contemporary child has available a multitude of compelling models via the entertainment media, particularly television” (Dutchmen, Daniels, and Bent 1978).
Therefore, television could often be described as sexist, if it is true that it reinforces prejudice sex-role stereotypes. These would include the idea that women are supposed to look ere pretty, be domestic, have children and then look after them while the man goes out to work, and these kinds of things. Another distinction that can be made is between sex-roles, quite literally the roles played, and sex-traits, which are personality attributes typically displayed by men or women (supposedly).
This is a little like the difference between sex, which is biological, and gender, which can describe the traits a sex is supposed to have. Sex-trait stereotypes include the idea that women are more emotional than men, easily flustered, fearful and anxious and other such notions. These are the stereotypical point of views that advertisers implant into their commercials, billboards, ads, etc. Another major influence of the media is eating disorders, alcoholism, smoking etc. Anorexia in particular is a disease with a complicated etiology and media images probably don’t play a major role.
However, these images certainly contribute to the body-hatred so many young women feel and to some the resulting eating problems, which range from bulimia to compulsive overeating to simply being obsessed with controlling one’s appetite. Advertising does promote abusive and abnormal attitudes about eating, drinking and thinness. It thus provides fertile soil for these obsessions to take root in and creates a climate of denial in which these diseases flourish (Kilojoules 1999). While conducting my research I watched over five weight commercials within one hour.
This is the type of advertising that leads to one having disorders or feeling down on themselves. The commercials were LA Weight Loss Center and how you could change your whole life and be skinny and happy, the Gastric Bypass Surgery Commercial, with Connie Wilson, on how you could have surgery and loss all this weight in n instant, and Centrex 3 to promote instant weight loss within a certain time period, plus energy. These types of advertisements are mind boggling. They keep running them within this hour to implant these images into an individuals mind thought.
Individuals then become obsessed with one’s weight and then it’s made to seem the norm. Another magazine advertisement I analyzed was a clothing line for Firebombed and Fitch. The girls in the advertisements were skin and bone (literally); I was able to see bones from places didn’t know they were able to appear. Of course this advertisement also promoted sex, plus the clothing. However, my point is that most of all the models in the magazines with Caucasian females who approximately weighed about 100-105 lbs. You always hear the phrase, “Do I look fat? This is the trend now, everyone is worried about their figure and how things fit. Conversely, believe a person should only focus on their well being, their health. In conclusion, advertising is an essential part of our society, as is the role of the media. After conducting my research I believe that media definitely affects the society’s thoughts and actions within themselves. Television certainly supports the mainstream ideology of our anthropometry culture. The media seems to attempt to break the gender roles barriers, however it hasn’t accomplished yet.
Unfortunately, out of the hundreds of commercials that I’ve watched within the three hours of critical observing probably ran across one positive advertisement. This shows that the media needs more progress to change the effects of gender roles. Our minds are being molded and changed into effects that can ruin our lives. We need to bring positive things into the media. For example, the commercial for “Truth” (the non-smokers commercial), it brings facts and statistics showing owe individuals die from lung cancer and second hand smoke.
That’s a positive outlook for the future. The media needs to implement positive images of males and females in their advertisements and commercials all over the world. Television allows people to see more things and so choose what they want to be D but unfortunately that choice for girls and boys are often one full of impossible contradictions in what they are shown, meaning that television perhaps confuses further an issue which it could help to resolve with more equal and less stereotypical portrayals of women and men.