Stereotyping: What Is It Good For?
Taking Art Foundations I this semester has been a real chore. I don’t feel I’ve learned anything at all about art or iconography. I don’t feel I’ve learned anything, period, except that I completely suck at all things cutting and pasting, and that superficial pointless ‘art’ projects (“cut out shapes in a magazine and rubber cement them on black bristol”) are a waste of time and thought. But probably the most obnoxious part of the class has been the last month or so, wherein the only thing we’ve done in lecture is ‘discuss’ stereotypes in advertising and art.
I have never seen another class try so hard to be a gender studies class and fail. Cultural anthropology had the prerogative to talk about gender stereotypes and history. Maybe art does too somewhere down the line in an advertising- or iconography-centered course, but not with this professor, and not with a basic art class. I felt as though the whole unit was simply her opportunity to inject her brand of bias into our ears, and I was amazed at how many people seemed to buy into it (then again, some people will say anything to please teacher).
Basically, it all began with iconography, reading symbols in art. That morphed into a weird over-sexualized version of semiotics, with us receiving a dated article touting the naturalized sexuality of cigarettes. Here’s the first problem. The article was dated by at least 20 years. That in itself makes it less valid to a modern worldview. It also implied that cigarettes are very often used in a sexual manner, almost always smoked a certain way by men, almost always smoked a different certain way by women, and the cigarette is a phallic prop. This made me laugh out loud! Looking at the modern U.S., where cigarettes are no longer considered even acceptable by a lot of people, the sexual contexts of smoking have all but disappeared. The idea of cigarettes being a naturalized sex prop certainly applies to, oh, say, half a century ago, when doctors apparently recommended certain brands of cigarettes to their patients and you rarely saw a flick without the hero or heroine lighting up at some point. But this is no longer the case, due for the most part to what we know of the health effects of smoking- it makes sense that the thing that causes something as disgusting as mouth cancer, something that invariably makes you less healthy and can be addicting, would be un-sexy (yet, ironically, hard alcohol still has a strong sexual context). Thus, in contrast, if smoking is ever done in the movies today, it’s increasingly done by the villain, the abrasive and unlikable protagonist, or the ’stupid’ kid. Doctors recommend quitting smoking. Most magazines rarely run cigarette ads anymore, for fear of retribution by anti-smoking groups or a fall in sales due to consumer disgust. Most would agree that for the larger part, cigarettes as sex props are a thing of the past for Americans. Yet apparently my professor doesn’t.
For the record, this article served as her basis for talking about everything in advertising being a matter of sexuality. I swear, she could make an ad for Starburst or Little Tikes into a sexual thing. Sex sells, we get that. But it doesn’t sell everything!
This developed into genderization in advertising. Boy oh boy! Apparently the western world’s still a patriarchy. I think she failed to address that there are different standards for different target audiences, mostly because she really does believe advertising is patriarchal. So we saw some male-dominant ads from the 80s and early 90s. The only one I think was printed within the last 5 years was this:
(Sorry for the small image size. If you can’t see it very well, the man is looking at a picture of a BMW folded open over the woman’s face. The text reads “The ultimate attraction.”)
Yes, it’s an extraordinarily sexual ad- nothing subtle about this one. And it is also clearly sexist, with the man on top looking at his car and using the woman as a sexual object- hell, she’s gladly objectifying herself. So this is a good example of sexism in advertising, a la my professor. But wait! What’s this I found while googling for this advertisment…?
Oh my gosh! It’s a woman on top this time, objectifying and dominating the man, while orgasming to the image of a car! And it isn’t even a more ‘feminized’ model of car- it’s the same one. Fancy that. I’d guess these ads were printed in different magazines, probably a men’s magazine for the first and a women’s magazine for the second. Target audience changes, advertising changes. And this woman-dominant advert is no anomaly. Look at many sexually-driven ads and you’ll see that a good number of them feature dominant women.
Sexism goes both ways. It’s less about who’s actually in charge than it is about what your target viewers or readers want to see. I think that’s the way it’s always been in advertising. It’s just that people have wanted to see different things in the past.
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