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Everyday Practice
The everyday practice to be discussed in this paper is a common media pattern, particularly the perpetual characterization of specific gender roles in the media through the use of television commercials.
To begin, for just about every product on the market there is an advertisement made to accompany it. Commercials are a common form of media, which are used for soliciting both products and services. They can be humorous, emotional, have a catchy jingle or an aesthetic appeal, or pretty much anything that would make them memorable. On the surface this type of advertising is useful, however, there is a negative side to this medium as well.
While constantly being bombarded with must-have products and services, viewers are also presented with images of generalized, and often idealized, kinds of people. More specifically, ideas of what masculinity and femininity should involve, in terms of traits and social roles, are presented to the viewers through this medium. For example, the common idea of masculinity often portrays attributes such as strength (both physically and emotionally), as well as holding the title of bread-winner in a family unit. Similarly, femininity is portrayed with its own set of characteristics such as being a patient homemaker. Current examples that portray these characteristics are advertisements for Swiffer, Old Spice and Mr. Clean, which will be analyzed later on in the paper. Furthermore, each of these advertisements has been in circulation for a significant amount of time, showing some modifications all while maintaining the same generalized main character. Additionally, each is aimed toward a specific audience, such as people of the same gender as the actor, while also being vi...
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...y also pave the way for social inequality by excluding and including particular viewers and asserting manipulation and control over the audience. The lesson here is that although humanity has progressed, it is still riddled with inklings of dominance, superiority, inequality and stereotypes, the likes of which people should try to be aware of in such a fast-paced world drenched in media and consumerism.
Works Cited
Brock, D. (2012). Power and everyday practice. (pp. 62-63). United States of America: Nelson
Education.
Mr. Clean Magic Reach Commercial [Web]. (2005). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvp6p_BzG0s
Old Spice - The Man Your Man Could Smell Like [Web]. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE
Swiffer Mud and Dirt What About Love 2011 [Web]. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSw50QKtppQ
Men and women both drive cars, it’s a simple necessity to be able go to work for most people, however, from the commercials on television, one would assume that men are the primary purchasers of cars. In Steve Craig’s essay, Men’s Men and Women’s Women, he analyzes four commercials to illustrate how advertisers strategically targets the viewers. Craig argues that advertisers will grasp the attention of the viewer by the gender ideals that both men and women have of each other. Not only do advertisers pick a target audience demographic, but they also will target the audience at specific time to air their commercials. By analyzing an Audi and Bud Light commercial, one can see that Craig arguments are true to an extent but it appears that commercials have gone from an idealized world to a more realistic and relatable stance. for are still [true, however it seems that commercials may have altered to appear more realistic.] [relevant to an extent. This is to say, it appears that advertisers may have altered their commercial tactics. ]
Advertisements are one of many things that Americans cannot get away from. Every American sees an average of 3,000 advertisements a day; whether it’s on the television, radio, while surfing the internet, or while driving around town. Advertisements try to get consumers to buy their products by getting their attention. Most advertisements don’t have anything to do with the product itself. Every company has a different way of getting the public’s attention, but every advertisement has the same goal - to sell the product. Every advertisement tries to appeal to the audience by using ethos, pathos, and logos, while also focusing on who their audience is and the purpose of the ad. An example of this is a Charmin commercial where there is a bear who gets excited when he gets to use the toilet paper because it is so soft.
Common sense seems to dictate that commercials just advertise products. But in reality, advertising is a multi-headed beast that targets specific genders, races, ages, etc. In “Men’s Men & Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig focuses on one head of the beast: gender. Craig suggests that, “Advertisers . . . portray different images to men and women in order to exploit the different deep seated motivations and anxieties connected to gender identity.” In other words, advertisers manipulate consumers’ fantasies to sell their product. In this essay, I will be analyzing four different commercials that focuses on appealing to specific genders.
The Home Depot is a supplier of home goods and appliances such as refrigerators, grills, and paint. The store often uses visual advertisements to attract customers. In these ads there are portrayals of both men and women, which help to illustrate the gender scripts that are prevalent within society. To analyze these illustrations and come to conclusions in terms of stereotypical gender scripts in commercials, a visual sociology research project was completed.
According to Steve Craig in Signs of Life in the USA, the economic structure of the television industry has a direct effect on the placement and content of all television programs and commercials. Craig is a professor in the department of radio, television, and film at the University of North Texas, Craig has written widely on television, radio history, and gender and media. His most recent book is Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America (2009). Craig talks about the analysis of four different television commercial, showing how advertisers carefully craft their ads to appeal, respectively, to male and female consumers. The gendered patterns in advertising that Craig outlines in his essay still exist today, in commercials of how a men and women are portrayed.
Some staunch opponents of gender roles might claim that her more feminine traits are a result of gendered advertising and thus are negative and hindering progress. Yet by making such a statement, they fail to recognize the great leaps in progress society has made in reducing the importance of adhering to one’s assigned role. Gender roles have existed since the dawn of human civilization, and though recent advertising trends have increased their prevalence in society, they are less influential now than at any point in human history.
The company Old Spice uses various elements of visual rhetoric to convince the consumer to purchase their product. In this case, the commercial is selling mens body wash. In almost every Old Spice commercial they use a handsome man to say to the consumer, in a passive-aggressive manner, that if he uses their product that he will achieve the unobtainable look that Old Spice portrays. Within this commercial, Old Spice prey on men’s insecurities about being attractive to the opposite sex. Making the men feeling vulnerable to their emotions, saying to them that they need to look like the man in the commercial and they can achieve that by using Old Spice.
According to Zayer and Coleman (2015) there are three pillars of institutions in advertising, and these pillars potentially influence how males and females are portrayed in the media. In the media, women are typically seen as vulnerable while men are in a powerful position. But Zayer and Coleman found that in the media both men and women feel vulnerable in a sense of being unable to uphold society’s expectations. The research was conducted through a series of interviews, focus groups, and field observations. The data was collected in two rounds, the first round was done in a large advertising agency where someone worked there (attending meetings and such) and interviewed some workers and created focus groups (Zayer & Coleman, 2015). The second round of data was collected by going to several advertising agencies in the U.S. and internationally, and found that they were more ethnically diverse (Zayer & Coleman, 2015). What Zayer and Coleman (2015) found that some believed that either media didn’t portray men or women in a negative way or that, they deflected personal responsibility and placed it on the network itself. This article shows how men and women are affected in the media and this connects to the theme of traditional gender roles, and how media influences
The work's topicality is characterized by the existence of the gender stereotypes in society, having generalization, and does not reflect individual differences in the human categories. Meanwhile, there is still discrimination on the labour market, human trafficking, sexual harassment, violence, women and men roles and their places in the family. Mass media offers us the reality, reduces the distance, but we still can see the negative aspects too. TV cultivates gender stereotypes, offering ideas about gender, relationships and ways for living. Such media ideas attach importance to many people in the society. Consequently, it is quite important identify gender stereotypes in the media, in order to prevent false views relating to gender stereotypes.
The media, through its many outlets, has a lasting effect on the values and social structure evident in modern day society. Television, in particular, has the ability to influence the social structure of society with its subjective content. As Dwight E. Brooks and Lisa P. Hébert write in their article, “GENDER, RACE, AND MEDIA REPRESENTATION”, the basis of our accepted social identities is heavily controlled by the media we consume. One of the social identities that is heavily influenced is gender: Brooks and Hébert conclude, “While sex differences are rooted in biology, how we come to understand and perform gender is based on culture” (Brooks, Hébert 297). With gender being shaped so profusely by our culture, it is important to be aware of how social identities, such as gender, are being constructed in the media.
In the essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” author and philosopher Susan Bordo discusses the history and current state of male representation in advertisements. While using her feminist background, Bordo compares and contrasts the aspects of how men and women are portrayed in the public eye. She claims that there has been a paradigm shift the media with the theory that not just women are being objectified in the public eye, but also men too. Since the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Calvin Klein commercials, men have started to become more dehumanized and regarded as sex symbols. In a similar fashion to how Bordo describes gender, race plays a similar role in the media. People of all different ethnicities and cultures are being categorized into an oversimplified and usually unfair image by the media over basic characteristics.
The question of gender discrimination and stereotyping still remains the actual one in the 21 century. The concept of “gender” as “social basis” assumes studying of the gender stereotypes ordering one line of role behavior in a family and society for men, and others for women. Certainly, gender stereotypes really exist, and they are various in the different countries and during different historical eras. Despite the extensive data of researches, discrimination is widely used in the sphere of mass media, which uses gender stereotypes to attract attention from the necessary auditory or satisfy their own purposes. There are diverse situations where gender discrimination may be expressed through advertisements: the most typical are job advertisements and commercials. As stereotypical representations together with strongly marked discriminative elements are widely represented in advertisements, it is essential to determine the
Gender is constructed at a very young age boys are taught to be masculine and girl are taught to be more feminine. In today’s society there are many ways to identify oneself as a male or a female. One way is through materialistic items. Advertisements target women and men to sell their products. The stereotypical traits of women are motherly, caring, slim, pretty, they are more sexualized. However men are more of a dominant figure in advertisements and they are much tougher, sports oriented, powerful, bold, and simple minded.
Advertising is an information source to inform people about the products and prices of the company, which can help them to make informed choices. More recently, a huge amount of money has been spent on advertising throughout the world. Different types of advertisement such as television, radio, magazine, newspaper, the internet, billboards and posters can influence consumer’s behavior positively or negatively as there are different arguments and opinions. This essay will focus on the purpose of the advertisement for the company, the positive and negative effects of the advertisement on consumer behavior. According to Shimp (2007), there are five important factors which determine the purpose of an advertisement in terms of marketers’ communication with consumers.
Commercials works through the human emotions and vanity and it appeals toward the psychologically domain turning into a temptation for weak mind people. For instance, if a person is at home watching T.V., very comfortable and suddenly, a commercial promoting any kind of food and drink comes up, that person will be hungry and thirsty in a couple of minutes. The advertising influenced his mind, provoking an involuntary reaction to do what the commercial induced him to do.