Yesterday brought the news that the city of Rome is banning sexist advertising. Publicly-owned advertising spaces will no longer be made available to ads that “use women's bodies or launch sexist messages.” The new regulations are a response to a campaign run by the Women's Union in Italy to promote communication that “goes beyond stereotypes.”
What about the UK, I thought, after I heard about this. What if similar rules were applied here? I headed home for an evening of research in front of the TV.
Actually, I didn't need to watch for more than half an hour as the material came flooding in thick and fast. There was the commercial for an interior design website that showed women (no men) prancing around their living rooms with delight at their newly-purchased cushions. The shampoo advert that showed a series of blonde women lounging around a room in black lace negligees while their hair inexplicably swirled around their heads in golden waves. Again, no men, though I can think of no reason why men and women shouldn't use the same shampoos or why the women couldn't have been fully dressed. The advert for a television show about “supercar salesmen” momentarily filled me with hope; stereotypically a male domain, the ad featured both men and women. But we were quickly informed that to sell a supercar to a woman, you don't actually talk to her about cars; you talk to her about shoes, obviously, and somehow convince her to buy a car in the process.
On the Tube this morning, I noticed more interior design adverts featuring women in their living rooms (we don't have much else to do with our time, you see). And flicking through the newspaper, it was more of the same. Particularly standout, I thought, was the Dove advert from their new #ChooseBeautiful campaign, which attempts to convince all women that we're beautiful just as we are, while simultaneously trying to sell us beauty products.
The Rome regulations appear to focus solely on the use of the female body—its sexualisation and objectification. But sexism in advertising is so much more varied than that. When it doesn't involve half-naked women with little or no relevance to the product being sold—yoghurt commercials are for some reason particularly fond of this technique—it plays on gender-based stereotypes and tropes, such as the boorish bloke who can't cook or clean and relies on microwave meals and help from his woman.
So it's not surprising that fast food advertising focuses on men.
While parenting, childcare and cleaning adverts almost always focus on women, implying that men don't have children, or if they do they don't spend much time with them since they're too busy watching the footie and zapping their microwave meals.
The stereotypes that so much advertising is based on do a disservice to men and women alike. They're easy for advertisers to fall back on because we're all so used to them, but they're mistaken. On the handful of occasions I've felt compelled to write to a company about it, I've been told it's to do with their "target market." In other words, the target market for cleaning liquid is women; the target market for fast food is men. But these advertisers are alienating a huge number of people who don't fit into their neat categories—men who wash dishes and women who like the odd chip. Believe me, they do exist. And appealing to men doesn't necessarily involve portraying them as useless layabouts; equally, there's no reason why appealing to women should involve the actresses being half-naked.
The big problem is: if we banned sexism in advertising, we wouldn't have many adverts left.
