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Gendered Advertising: From Text to Industry to Classroom

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Learning to Sell Sex(ism)

Abstract

Examining and analysing the gendered attitudes and opinions of advertising students cannot occur without considering both the gendered cultures that operate in advertising practice and the advertising texts that the sector produces—both of which will shape their future professional lives. It is crucial, therefore, to survey the key trends in advertising’s representations of femininity and masculinity through the critiques offered by second-wave feminism in the 1970s up to the contemporary period of the 2000s, and also to scrutinise how industry responses to feminism influenced recurring motifs in advertising imagery, particular since the onset of postfeminism in the 1990s. Further discussion must also focus on how creative and cultural workers can be conceptually and theoretical understood, on the hypermasculine working cultures and practices that proliferate in advertising agencies, and on the insight provided by academics into the creative advertising practitioner as a gendered subject. Additionally, attention is afforded to positioning the advertising student as a future practitioner ‘in training’—one who will be tasked with making ethical and moral, as well as professional, decisions with regard to depicting the sexes in particular ways. All of these are given consideration in this chapter before the study’s findings are outlined in the following three chapters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is something that, arguably, has gained even more momentum since the publication of Tasker and Negra’s book in 2007, as evidenced, for example, in the threat to reproductive rights currently playing out in the US.

  2. 2.

    The other nine characteristics include appeasement of women’s anger, use of more edgy/authentic looking models, shift from sex objects to desiring sexual subjects, focus on being and pleasing ourselves, articulation of feminism and femininity in adverts, eroticisation of male bodies, development of queer chic, use of gender reversals in ads, and revenge themes.

  3. 3.

    See the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) 2013 report ‘Advancing Gender Equality in Decision-Making in Media Organisations’, which gives an EU overview of the hierarchical and sectoral segregation of women’s participation in media organisations. For instance, the study found that women account for less than one-third of all top-level decision-making positions in surveyed media organisations across the EU member states.

  4. 4.

    However, this is not the case in Ireland, where the BA and MSc courses in advertising taken as case studies for this research are both positioned within the business discipline.

  5. 5.

    Of the three candidates, two were men (one was deemed unqualified, while the other was deemed qualified, alternately in terms of education and then in terms of experience) and one was a woman (she was deemed qualified, alternately in terms of education and then in terms of experience).

  6. 6.

    That is, perceptions of how vulnerable or impervious men and women were to representations of gender in advertising imagery.

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    Aileen O’Driscoll

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O’Driscoll, A. (2019). Gendered Advertising: From Text to Industry to Classroom. In: Learning to Sell Sex(ism). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94280-3_2

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