After researching all day at work, emailing notes to your boss, checking in with your parents and paying multiple bills with your iPhone, you feel like Super Woman capable of conquering the world. During your lunch break, you decide to kill time by thumbing through your favorite magazine, only to feel disheartened by the portrayal of women in advertisements. The male model in Gucci’s clothing ad is practically keeping his female model from falling over, holding her around the midsection with one muscular arm. Santa Margherita’s wine ad couldn’t be more cliché with a beautiful, Barbie-esque woman sipping Pinot Grigio and sitting on a businessman’s lap. You stifle a gag when catching a glimpse of Dolce and Gabanna’s new fragrance ad where the woman’s dress straps are sliding off her shoulders as she lays next to a chiseled, shirtless man. How can these images stray so far from reality? you wonder. Apparently advertisers need to do more research on their target audiences.
Nearly two-thirds of women with children under age 18 have jobs outside the home, and that’s more than three times the rate in 1960, according to Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s article “Five Myths About Working Mothers” in The Washington Post. Women must juggle the demands of families with careers, and they no longer rely on their male counterparts for financial stability or fulfillment. Male dominance has become less realistic as both males and females contribute to the household and support their families, but it continues to be a theme in advertising as women are depicted grasping and leaning close to a man, or men, to feel protected. It seems that female models in these advertisements desire a sense of trustworthiness, assurance and domineering authority assumed to be associated with the “perfect” man, but we know we can find all of these qualities in ourselves.
I find it naïve for advertisers to think of us as stay-at-home women taken care of by successful, wealthy men. In my own experience, this unrealistic outlook on societal norms and gender roles proves more often to be the exact opposite. The utopian society created by the popular media significantly contrasts that of our realistic society. The lifestyles symbolized in advertisements are so far from the truth that they’re almost comical. Men display muscular physiques while masculine expressions radiate from their faces. Women are shown with alluring, radiant hair and flaunt seductive, slender figures. Reality? Pearly, white teeth are hardly ever natural, atrocious hair days outnumber the satisfactory ones and we women are more than just a pretty face.
Society views women on a different scale than men, seeing them as more dependent and sensitive, and this cultural assumption mirrors itself in the works of persuasive advertisers. They try to convince us that by buying their product, we will obtain an inferior status and have all kinds of men begging to take care of us. We would be compromising our powerful, feminine identities to fit these standards, and that would mean giving up on ourselves and our families who are relying on us. Media try to convince us that we’re unfulfilled when we’re not “doing it all,” playing the student, girlfriend, sibling and sex-symbol roles 24/7. They depict us as weak in advertisements when, in reality, we’re the exact opposite.
It’s time for advertisers to fuse reality and advertising and come to grips with the fact that women feel both beautiful and powerful when we’re tackling it all. We must embrace our identities and exhibit confidence despite our portrayal in the media. We must not be defined by manipulative advertisers because they are so out of touch with the reality in women’s lives. We deserve more respect and empowerment in advertisements, and we would appreciate picking up a magazine and seeing women portrayed in more accurate lights. To the strangers in corporate offices who attempt to know us better than ourselves—you have some homework to do.