Gender Roles in Advertising
Little Sally, 6, and Billy, 8, are sitting down in front of the family television for an afternoon of enjoyable programming. Suddenly an advertisement interrupts their favorite show. The advertisement features a young woman cleaning a kitchen with a product that seems to be easy and enjoyable to use. The woman is smiling through this chore as she turns to the camera and comments on how fast the product helped her to clean her kitchen. Sally and Billy patiently wait for their show to reappear and pay little attention to the advertisement. This is an average scene in any given home in America and yet this seemingly small fragment of time does have a sociological impact. Many women and men live their lives without the awareness that advertising has had a socializing impact on them. Children and adolescents spend an average of 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television (APA statistics). Advertising pops up approximately 3 to 5 times an hour or more (this was just my observation). So, within these 22 to 28 hours per week, children see a conservative average of 60 to 140 advertisements. Advertising places genders into given roles and help to perpetuate gender stereotypes. A social theory that
would explain the socializing effect of advertising upon children, and therefore men and women, is the Social Learning Theory. This paper will explore the gender roles within advertising and use the Social Learning Theory to evaluate the effects of advertising. The second side of the issue to be investigated is the portrayal of men in the advertising industry. Boys are encouraged to be aggressive, become leaders, engage in sports, and grow into 'macho' men. Research by Sobieraj, 1998 (Children Now, Images of Men and Boys in Advertising, Spring, 2000), found in advertising for toys that these showed boys as "strong, independent, athletic, in control of their environments, adventurous, and aggressive. Girls are [shown as] giggling, gentle, affectionate, fixated on their physical appearance, and extremely well behaved." Also in this study, it was found that action figure advertising "showed boys manipulating action figures to shoot guns at one another, fight with knives, punch and kick, and inflict harm in various other ways." The percentage of men featured in advertising for domestic products is low and when these ads do feature men, the men are often seen as unknowledgeable and unnatural. In the above-mentioned article, a study by Goffman, 1979, concluded that men in domestic situations were "often presented as ludicrous and childlike..". Another stereotype present in advertising is the "wimp" but this stereotype only serves to further impress the desire to be masculine and aggressive upon males. "Wimps" in advertising are seen as scrawny and possessing female traits such as emotional sensitivity and are dominated and laughed at by other characters present in the ad. The Children Now article addresses the stereotype of "wimp" and presents a Sony PlayStation ad to illustrate the point that sensitive men in advertising are poked fun at. The ad features a man and woman watching an emotional movie and the male is made fun of and called various names such as "whipped" by a game character Crash Bandicoot. The character continues to taunt the male until the male starts to play a video game when the female vacates the room. Boys are taught through such blatant stereotypes advertising to be aggressive, unemotional, and to participate in activities that are deemed mas
Some common words found in the essay are:
Learning Theory, Advertising Spring, Sally Billy, Margaret Anderson, University Wisconsin, Role Stereotyping, Little Sally, Family Foundation, Dr Smith, Crash Bandicoot, social learning, learning theory, social learning theory, gender roles, advertising industry, performed 70s 80s, socializing effect, effect advertising, stereotypes advertising, socializing effect advertising, 22 28, smiling chore, gender roles advertising, studies performed 70s, sally billy,
Approximate Word count = 1537
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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