Sexism and Objectification of Women in Advertising

Introduction: Sexism in Advertising and the Male Gaze

There are numerous examples of sexism in advertising: from Britney Spears' advertisements for her perfume Curious, in which she strips down to her underwear for the camera, to Victoria's Secret models like Chrissy Teigen undergoing both plastic surgery and photoshopping for the company's lingerie ads, women are routinely objectified for the "male gaze," as Laura Mulvey put it (Turow, 2009, p. 195). While sexism can take many forms — such as the stereotype of women as homemakers ever ready to please their husbands that was promoted in mid-20th century advertisements — in advertising today, sexism is most readily displayed by way of objectification, as seen in Go Daddy ads, Victoria's Secret ads, beer commercials, and so on, where women's bodies are treated as commodities.

Feminism challenged the notion of this objectification of women for a time, but in the post-feminist culture of today, sex has bombarded media and women appear more objectified than ever — and willingly so. Women in the media appear to celebrate their sexuality in a way that would have been frowned upon in the feminist era as a kowtowing to sexism by men (i.e., women acting like nothing more than eye candy for the male gaze). However, as Rosalind Gill (2015) points out, the concept of sex has shifted in the post-feminist era. Likewise, in her essay on empowerment and sexism, Gill (2008) argues that rather than women feeling ashamed of subjecting themselves to the male gaze, they seek to use their sexuality to dominate in today's culture. Gill asserts that what defines the post-feminist model is the shift from objectification to subjectification — in other words, the woman is not thought of as the object of the male gaze but rather the male has become the subject of the female's desire to dominate sexually: "today women are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their (implicitly 'liberated') interests to do so" (Gill, 2008, p. 45). This paper examines how sex is used in advertising to show why this type of media is inherently sexist in spite of the post-feminist perspective that appears to justify or validate the sexually explicit use of the female form to sell products in today's culture.

Post-Feminist Theory and Female Sexual Agency

Post-feminism is embraced in today's culture because the culture itself has changed. Sexual liberation has not led to the type of empowerment predicted by feminists like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, but rather to a culture in which women are put on pedestals and praised for their example in order to mitigate any sense of guilt about how they are still, in reality, subjecting themselves to the male gaze. Erving Goffman (1979) states that "posing for an ad almost invariably involves a carryover of sex" (p. 26), so it cannot be argued that women in advertising are simply expressing a form of gender equality. Rather, women are deliberately downplaying the differences between male and female sexuality in an effort to politicize sexuality from an egalitarian perspective. As men and women attempt to shift the values of culture away from the patriarchal order, they argue that women are no longer the subjects of the male gaze because the patriarchs are not in control (Turow, 2009) — but this is simply not true. At the end of the day, the patriarchal order is still firmly in place, the patriarchs cut the checks, and the use of female sexuality to sell magazines, ad space, and generate clicks is still widely practiced.

Gill examines whether sexual agency can ever be used as a tool of empowerment for women — and indeed this was one of the premises of early feminism: women could demonstrate their independence through their own sexual agency. However, in the advertising world, no real independence is occurring; women are still selling or contracting out their sexual agency for monetary gain. What fuels the transaction is the underlying sexism of society. Post-feminist theory posits that this is not sexism per se, but rather women using technology and consumerism as a launch pad for their own benefit: they apply their sexuality in a system that allows them to use what they have in order to better their position economically.

False Values, Objectification, and the Advertising Industry

Advertising today projects and perpetuates a false set of values with respect to women, femininity, and womanhood, as Kilbourne (2010) shows in Killing Us Softly 4. Advertisers use tricks — such as camera framing, lighting, makeup, costuming, post-production editing, and photoshopping — to make women appear in an idealized form that will appeal to both men and women. The Victoria's Secret ad that ran during the Super Bowl, in which Adriana Lima twirls a football between her legs to entice viewers to buy the company's lingerie, uses all the tricks of marketing to give men and women the idea that owning this brand of underwear will transform one into a kind of sexualized goddess. Likewise, in many television ads, women are depicted as controlling and jealous for comedic effect while men are shown putting up with the foibles of the female sex for laughs. Women are either portrayed as sexualized images or as burdens that are tolerantly endured by a supposedly superior male sex.

Budweiser, Geico, State Farm, Doritos, Go Daddy, and many other companies have used women in these ways to sell their products. While women have long been the target of male jokes in advertising — the old Schlitz beer ads show a woman burning dinner at the stove while the husband jokes, "Don't worry, darling! You didn't burn the beer!" — today's ads have turned increasingly toward sexualizing women to an unrealistic degree.

Feona Attwood (2014) explains the new perspective on female sexuality in the media: "Where once sexualized representations of women in the media presented them as the passive, mute objects of an assumed male gaze, today women are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner because it suits their liberated interests to do so" (p. 100). In other words, women have become complicit in the crime of sexism and in their own exploitation. Post-feminist theory argues that women are not applying their sexuality to the trade of commerce merely to line the pockets of advertisers, but rather to line their own — and essentially they are saying that if you cannot beat them, you might as well join them. The post-feminist culture celebrates when women display their forms and calls it empowering, though nothing has really changed in the equation other than the claim that these women are being well-compensated for their complicity while being praised for their liberation.

One must wonder, however, exactly what they have been liberated from. They are still subjecting themselves to the male gaze, even if they are treating it as a game played in order to dominate sexually. They are still defining themselves as objects of lust, even if their aim is to use lust as a form of control. They are still putting themselves into the hands of advertisers who have known since the time of Edward Bernays in the first half of the 20th century how to use female sexuality as a means to manipulate the consuming consciousness. Sex sells today just as it did a century ago. The fact that women now view the selling of their sex as empowering — whereas they once viewed it as exploitative — does not really justify it from any traditional or feminist standpoint. Only from the perspective of post-feminism does this type of behavior become laudatory, and only then because the moral justification for it rests solely on the notion that whatever the woman wants is good, because her will is what matters most. If she wills herself to be a tool for advertising, that is her right and she should feel empowered to do so: such is the essence of post-feminism.

Conclusion: Sexism Rebranded

Advertising is sexist — and that can be seen simply by looking at the representation of women in the medium. Women are depicted unrealistically and used to generate profits for companies that want to sell their products to insecure and impressionable men and women, boys and girls. In today's post-feminist culture, this sexism is celebrated as liberating for women, but the reality is that it is enslaving and perpetuates a false concept of what real femininity — and even real masculinity — should be. Today's post-feminists promote a new concept of these characteristics, and that is why today's advertisers get away with hawking their products through sexist and exploitative ads.

References

Attwood, F. (2014). Mainstreaming sex: The sexualization of western culture. IB Tauris.

Evans, A., & Riley, S. (2015). Technologies of sexiness: Sex, identity, and consumer culture. Sexuality, Identity, and Society. Oxford University Press.

Gill, R. (2008). Empowerment/sexism: Figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising. Feminism & Psychology, 18(1), 35–60.

Gill, R. (2015). Gender and the media. John Wiley & Sons.

Goffman, E. (1979). Gender advertisements. Harper & Row.

Kearney, M. C. (Ed.). (2012). The gender and media reader. Routledge.

Kilbourne, J. (2010). Killing Us Softly 4. Cambridge Documentary.

Turow, J. (2009). The advertising and consumer culture reader. Routledge.