What Are Gender Stereotypes In Advertising

In this advertisement, advertiser constructs a life-style of middle class or successful people through connect irrelevant elements of beauty and car together and endows with significance that the owners of these characteristics has the rich, prosperous and successful life, and that is a sign of successful men. Although this kind of gender stereotypes affected by the traditional value of the relationship between men and women, which is the male are superior to the female, and women are seems powerless and men have ultimate potency of power (Stringer, 1997, p.38). It is still controversial on commodity feminism through encode the relations between succeed and femininity and turn women into sign values. Goldman has argued about commodity feminism,

which is advertisers readdress women as an object, a style, and a sign of commodity to give new values of consumer goods since women has become a significant part of consumers and women’s awareness became a condition of everyday life. Feminist values constitutes by equal treatment in workplace and home, personal liberty, self-definition, and independence. And these features are the centre goals of most women’s desires and values. However, mass media advertising express feminism in an oppositional way in order to conform to the demand of the commodity form. In Sonata’s ad, feminism is nothing but a signifier of successful men and that can be defined as a kind of gender stereotypes as a sequence of advertiser’s visual sexist portrayals and reified commodity. Therefore, this advertisement can be critique as controversial ad because it consumes female image as a signifier of merchandise and object that resist modern women’s values of feminism.

The most common stereotypes of gender are female looks sexy and male looks muscular not only in advertising, but also appear in mass media.

The basic strategy of this kind of gender stereotypes is men will ignore the advertisements by paying more attention on woman if the advertiser includes woman’s image, and if they use male photograph in advertisement it will attract more female consumers. Therefore, people will pay more attention on advertisement and then have more possibility to shape positive attitude of that product, or at least, bear that product in mind when they need to consume it (Courtney and Whipple, 1983, p.74). Moreover, it is not only a strategy to attract more consumers, more importantly; it is a method to stand out in a “male-dominated work environment in advertising”, and it challenges the value of patriarchy and “double sex standards” (Fedorenko, 2015, p.476). However, sexy female image are often controversially critique as gender stereotypes of women in advertising. According to Laura Mulvey’s idea of “male gaze”, it points out that female are sexual objects to men to please them in an “erotic spectacle” (1992, cited in Marcellus, 2009). In Sonata’s ad, this woman dresses sexy in order to be a sexual reward, a tool to attract men and accessory of a successful man. This expression of women object to the idea of feminism that has mentioned before, women is independent, and the reason for being sexy and glamour is not to please men and fulfil male’s desire of sex. So, this advertisement provides a negative feeling for women that reinforce the gender stereotypes of women looks sexy in order to satisfy male’s desire of

sex.