Gender, Power, and Fetishism in Under Armour Advertising
This essay analyzes an Under Armour men's underwear advertisement to examine how consumer advertising shapes gender norms, sexuality, and cultural values. Drawing on Jean Kilbourne's critiques of advertising and Jack Solomon's analysis of American consumer culture, the paper argues that the advertisement deploys fetishism, heteronormativity, and idealized body imagery to sell an ordinary product by associating it with male sexual prowess and social dominance. The essay explores how the ad's visual composition — including the positioning of the male model, the objectified female figure, and the urban loft setting — reinforces patriarchal values and perpetuates unrealistic body ideals for both men and women.
- Introduction: Advertising, Gender, and Sexuality: Thesis: Under Armour ad promotes fetishism and chauvinism
- Visual Composition and the Objectification of Women: Ad imagery positions woman as passive furniture
- Heteronormativity and Male Dominance: Ad reinforces heteronormative male power over women
- Fetishism and the Eroticization of Products: Underwear eroticized despite purely functional product text
- Unrealistic Body Ideals and Consumer Insecurity: Idealized bodies fuel insecurity and drive purchases
- Female Representation and Patriarchal Values: Female figure reinforces patriarchal sexual and social norms
- Conclusion: Selling a Dream Through Power and Sex: Ad sells fantasy of sexual and social dominance
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay grounds its argument in close visual analysis, unpacking specific details of the advertisement — the model's posture, the woman's placement, the loft setting — and connecting each to broader cultural claims.
- It integrates multiple scholarly sources (Kilbourne and Solomon) fluidly, using direct quotations to support interpretive claims rather than substituting for them.
- The paper maintains a consistent critical stance throughout, linking aesthetic choices in the ad to systemic ideological structures such as patriarchy, heteronormativity, and consumer fetishism.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates semiotic analysis — reading the advertisement not only for what it literally depicts but for what its signs, symbols, and visual codes communicate culturally. The author interprets the woman's blending garments, the brick wall, and the ad's tagline as carriers of ideological meaning, showing how advertising encodes power relations into ostensibly neutral commercial imagery.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a broad claim about advertising and culture, then narrows to a thesis about the specific Under Armour ad. It proceeds section by section through the ad's key features: composition and objectification, heteronormativity, product fetishism, body ideals, and female representation. The conclusion synthesizes these threads into a final judgment about the ad's ideological function. This funnel-then-build structure is well-suited to media criticism essays.
Introduction: Advertising, Gender, and Sexuality
Advertising's most fundamental function is to sell products, but in order to do so, advertising must also shape the values and norms of the culture. One of the most obvious ways advertising shapes social norms and cultural values is through the representations of gender and sexuality. Few products other than adult toys, condoms, and others of an overtly sexual nature offer as much potential to shape, play with, and manipulate gender and sexuality as undergarments. In an advertisement for its line of men's underwear, the company Under Armour promotes an ordinary product by claiming that it has an erotic appeal. The fine print of the advertisement states mainly that the underwear is comfortable and can keep the wearer "cool and dry," but the image speaks more about the way the underwear will confer grand sexual prowess and status on the males who wear it. Although the Under Armour advertisement is powerful and effective, it highlights some of the problematic features of consumer culture, including fetishism and chauvinism.
Visual Composition and the Objectification of Women
The Under Armour advertisement depicts a male model wearing a pair of otherwise nondescript black underpants. Appearing as a full-page advertisement in a magazine, the image showcases the physique of the man wearing the underwear. His is an idealized male body akin to ancient Greek statues, in which each muscle is finely chiseled and honed. The man is broad-shouldered and stands stiffly at attention in an almost military fashion, but given the presence of a woman on the bed behind him, the viewer feels as if a private moment has been interrupted. The look on the man's face appears to say, "What are you doing here?"
Behind him, in the background of the image but no less important, is a woman wearing a silky gown that blends in with the satin pillowcases. The continuity between the woman's garments and the pillowcases suggests that she is simply part of the furniture — something to be sat on and used. She exists, as the title of the ad boldly asserts, "for the benefit of mankind."
The woman sits in a provocative pose with one thigh exposed and a gaze directed straight into the camera. A brick wall implies that the couple is in a sleek urban loft, and the grey minimalist color scheme carries a stereotypically masculine American aesthetic. Given that urban lofts are expensive, the advertisement also bears a potent subtext connecting sexual attractiveness to social status and financial power. Sex, money, and power are intimately linked. The Under Armour advertisement therefore exposes pre-existing gender norms regarding aesthetics and lifestyle.
Works Cited
Kilbourne, Jean. Killing Us Softly. Film.
Kilbourne, Jean. "Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt."
Solomon, Jack. "Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising." The Signs of Our Times. Putnam, 1988.
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