Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

All advertising is manipulative wouldn’t you say? I admit I’ve been remiss in not noticing the worthy-ness factor until you pointed it out and my sons confirmed it.
But there are also ads which try to sell women things that could be viewed as possibly unlikely to appeal to women which infuriate me. I’m thinking of the Intel one, all in pink, which used to assume women want to choose computers by way of little quizzes that ask inane questions (similar to “choose your ideal partner, is he charming, intelligent etc”). I think Sony do something similar. Is there anything equivalent trying to sell men something perceived as unlikely to appeal to them?

The photo is lovely and reCaptcha says “it” “charmingly” :)

[Hi A, thanks for reporting confirmation from your sons. As for the pink computer chips and power drills? Yeah, um, what’s that about? I mean… if nothing else you’d think they’d do something a little clever and maybe use that blue color that’s always used to demonstrate superior “absorbency” in tampon and pad advertisements. —fl]

I have always argued that to find the main culprit of perpetuating misogyny and patriarchal gender-binary attitudes, has to be mainstream advertising.

Any advert works by proposing or implying an ideal world, in which the advertiser’s product somehow plays a key role.

These ideal worlds almost always present a very clear depiction of the “traditional” gender binary, with it being the woman’s job to stay at home, look after the kids, do the cooking, cleaning, etc and the man’s job to go out and be the wage-earner, adventurer, etc.

Even where they purport to be subverting these norms, in fact they are subtly upholding them. For example, there are a number of adverts that present men doing housework; however, most of them have the men doing a task that is supposedly long and laborious, in order to score points (i.e. worthiness) with their womenfolk. The point is that the product makes what seems a long and laborious task into a short and easily-finished one, so that you can score worthiness points and still have time to do “manly” things like watch the sport on the television.

The only other example is more interesting, in that it presents two “housewives” who are actually very obviously big, burly, builder-types in drag, competing to mop up spilt liquids. one uses “our leading competitor” and the other uses the product being advertised. Even though this does not show men having an “ulterior motive” it still supports the gender binary, because the men are in drag – emphasising (for “comic” purposes, of course) that the work they are doing is “women’s work”.

Only in a few areas is gender representation in advertising less clear-cut, for example, car adverts nowadays do not seem to associate the genders with particular types of car, at least, not as much as they used to do.

[Nicely put, SE. —fl]

You said:

“What’s overlooked is that those ads instruct men too.“

What I was saying is that it’s NOT overlooked in general – just in the class YOU’RE taking. Complaining that men’s issues are being overlooked in a women’s studies class seems a lot like complaining that you don’t get to see any elephants on a whale watch.

[All true, Plymouth, but as I might have said earlier, you get the same reaction from chemists in physics classes or vice versa since their pragmatic vs. precision relationships to mathematics is so different. (I took an integrated studies class with a physicist, and a chemist, and a microbiologist and their panel discussions as we progressed through each of their subject areas were, to say the least, fascinating. And instructive. Especially considering the subject matter included the history and philosophy of science. —fl]

Plymouth, I’m glad you posted that title. I’d be interested in screening it.

FWIW, I do show Killing Us Softly III in my intro to women’s studies class, and I always make sure that men and masculinity are a big part of the discussion. This is partly a reflection of my own interests, but it’s also indicative of women’s studies’ gradual transformation into gender studies. We just renamed our program “Women’s and Gender Studies.” We kept “women” in the name for reasons figleaf captured very well in his comment above. If we ever become a non-sexist society, there’ll be no reason to foreground women anymore. But until that utopian day, our current name describes what we do.

There’s considerable variation in how much women’s studies instructors care about – and teach about – masculinity. But men and masculinity have been the subject of serious scholarship since the late 1980s, and by the 1990s most women’s studies classes were incorporating it. I don’t know when or where you went to college, Plymouth, but I’d be cautious about assuming that the name of the course guarantees the analysis will be one-sided.

Figleaf, I’m not gonna comment on the substance of your post here, because I started writing something and got even less pithy than usual. And so I’ve now got a post on my blog involving your stuff and Luce Irigaray. I’m really not competent to write about her or any other French feminist, but that’s the beauty of blogging, isn’t it – the freedom to experiment.

[I just went over and read your post, Sungold. Makes sense to me. I might add it also makes sense that Women’s Studies would have evolved considerably, especially as it’s become more accepted in the mainstream. —fl]