Does Male Bashing Sell More Products?

By: Leann Cranmer   Marketers are using an interesting tactic in recent years—male bashing. My, how the advertising pendulum has swung! For decades men were depicted as strong, competent husbands who went out into the world and conquered it in order to earn a living for their families. Women were stereotyped as creatures solely interested in finding a husband, then making him happy by keeping a spotless home, cooking delicious meals and maintaining a svelte figure. Who remembers these popular advertisements from the middle of the twentieth century: Palmolive’s “A wife can blame herself if she loses love by getting ‘middle aged’ skin;” Total’s “Keep up with the house while you keep down your weight;” “Christmas morning she’ll be happier with a Hoover;” or The Folger’s commercial in which the husband complains that “the girls at work make better coffee on their hot plates” than his wife does at home? Advertising’s job is to sell products, and these advertisements did just that; with the side-effect of demeaning and objectifying women. They reflected the culture of the period. They remind me of my well-meaning but out-of-touch grandmother. After dinner one evening my mother was washing a glass when it shattered and deeply cut her hand resulting in a scar. My grandmother’s initial reaction was, “Well, thank goodness you’re already married because you wouldn’t be able to find a husband now.” My grandmother was a wonderful woman, but when my mom repeated the remark to me, I reacted with disbelief and anger—not just for my mom but for my dad. How dare my beloved grandmother imply that my mom was only worth her beautiful skin AND that my dad would be shallow enough to reject her because she had a scar? Just as my grandmother had no idea I would find her attitude off-putting, many pre-feminist advertisers had no idea that many women would find their marketing tactics insulting. God bless the researchers who figured out that women were the shopping decision-makers in most households. This shift occurred in the 1960s, in conjunction with the rise of the feminist movement, and compelled advertisers to change the tone and messaging in their ads. Suddenly, ads showed women as strong, smart and in control. But somehow, when that shift happened, the gender bashing was reversed rather than disappearing. The trend was extended right into TV programming, where sit-coms mirrored the strong woman/weak male trope… and continue to do so today. Reverse Bias I wonder if the advertisers who market products to women using “reverse bias” toward men realize they are angering potential consumers or facing a future backlash. In reverse bias ads, men are portrayed as childish, incompetent and, in some cases, downright stupid. Oscar Meyer Selects’ “It’s Yes Food” campaign is a good example of gender bias. In one of the commercials, the clueless husband tells his wife he is going to “Like” the babysitter on Facebook, start wearing skinny jeans and quit his job to write a blog. To each of these statements the wife replies, “No.” It isn’t until he asks about eating cold cuts from a package and the wife points to the label “Oscar Meyer Selects, no artificial preservatives,” that the wife finally says yes to something he wants. Other commercials in the campaign have the husband demonstrate his incompetence and total reliance on his wife’s better judgment when a tree house he builds for his son falls down, when he hands the same young son a chain saw and tells him to yank hard, and when he calls home like a teenager to ask permission to stay out a little longer with his friends. The women who buy cold cuts may find the ads amusing, but according to many comments on YouTube, men do not. The Oscar Meyer Selects campaign is just one example of this trend. FedEx’s “It’s so easy to ship internationally, practically anyone can do it” campaign also highlights men as stupid and/or incompetent. It’s implied in several of the spots that it is so easy to use FedEx, “even a man can do it.” In one spot a man cannot figure out that the FedEx box he is trying to seal by licking has an adhesive pull tab. Both campaigns are meant to be humorous and obviously target women. Yet how many men (and, yes, women) are insulted by the male bashing? Plenty, we’re guessing, especially as changing employment trends have created a new generation of daddies who work at home (and do housework, childcare, and yes, the shopping) while their wives are the corporate breadwinners. According to Business News Daily, men are the primary shoppers in one-third of all households. The folks at Squidoo recently created a “lens” on the topic, sharing multiple examples of male-bashing in ads, and a list of organizations waging battle against TV programmers and advertisers. You’ll also find the topic on many “daddy blogs,” and a number of recent books address the trend. When Gender Bias Gets Ugly There is also a burgeoning library of academic studies on how gender portrayals in advertising, TV and film affect children’s self-perceptions. We know advertising has negatively impacted on women’s ideas about body image and healthy weight. Advertisers consciously manipulate our fears about not fitting in, having bad breath, body odor, not being “cool,” and being un-sexy. Gender bias is one more trend that may have longer-lasting effects than the immediate intention of selling more products. One could even make the argument that we’ve reached a point in our cultural development where advertising messages tend to objectify both genders—sex sells, as they say, or so advertisers persist in believing. But that’s another topic…