Sexist stereotypes exist because sometimes they are true
Most women I know clean up after their family. Most men fail to do housework
If you’ve never taken a stroll through the corridors of sexist advertising history, it’s well worth a wander. During the Second World War, the US Department of State implored women to “gather ’round! The soldiers need our help. Turns out you gals are useful after all”.
A decade later, Hoover put out an ad featuring a woman lovingly caressing her dustbuster – “Christmas morning, and forever after… she’ll be happier with a Hoover” – while Del Monte Ketchup used the slogan: “You mean a woman can open it?” In the Sixties, Benson & Hedges went with: “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
Then came the Co-op’s Piñata Egg advert: “Be a good egg. Treat your daughter for doing the washing-up.” Spa company USPAAH tried the hard sell: “Out with the guys ’til 4am again? Keep her sweet with a spa mani/pedi at home.” And estate agents Marsh & Parsons’ ad campaign featured a woman draped over an older man alongside the caption: “A charming period property with a modern extension.”
Actually, those last three examples weren’t old at all; they ran this year – backing up findings in the Advertising Standards Authority’s new report, Depictions, Perceptions and Harm, that while good progress has been made on banning overly sexual and body-shaming ads, a “tougher line” is needed on those featuring “stereotypical gender roles”. And that means potentially banning ads that feature women cleaning up after their family and men failing to do housework, under strict new watchdog rules.
“Portrayals that reinforce outdated and stereotypical views on gender roles in society can play their part in driving unfair outcomes for people,” explained chief executive Guy Parker. Hard to argue with that. But unfortunately for Parker, the ASA and the increasingly thin-skinned public, many of these gender stereotypes are not as outdated as they’d like them to be up on Planet PC.
Most of the women I know still clean up after their family: fact. Most of the men I know fail to do enough housework: fact. So what the ASA are really wrestling with here is… the truth.
Now just as the instinctive reaction to truth in comedy is laughter (or offence, if you’re a Planet Pc-bot – and, actually, that’s not instinctive but contrived), recognising the innate truth, however caricatural, of a stereotype on screen, on a billboard or in a magazine prompts consumers to nibble.
As outrageous as that US Department of State “turns out you gals are useful after all” slogan now seems, talk to many women who lived through the Second World War as their husbands and sons were on the front line and they will assure you that a desire to be more useful was at the forefront of their minds. Sharing a moment with your Hoover might be a stretch, but I’ll hazard a guess that most women have at some point asked a man to open a ketchup bottle – not because men are superior, with vastly enhanced neurological powers, but because they are generally physically stronger: fact. As for Marsh & Parsons’s “period properties”, I married one
– and let me tell you the renovations are still ongoing.
So while UK companies can vie to out-prig one another in response to the ASA’S report, and feature women shaving their 5 o’clock shadow and men breast-feeding till their hearts’ content, they’re unlikely to rake in the same revenue. Where there is no self-recognition in advertising, people won’t buy.
More than the fraudulence of all these tokenistic responses to gender inequality – whether it be the BBC’S presumably cynically motivated decision to cast Jodie Whittaker as the 13th Doctor Who or London Underground scrapping their “ladies and gentleman” announcements – is the breathtaking arrogance we have towards the past. We seem to be convinced that every generation before ours was not simply backward and laughably ill-informed, but also, apparently, incapable of irony.
After all, it’s just possible that some of those vintage sexist advertisers were winking and pigtail-pulling, just as it’s possible not every woman in history was a doormat dreaming of the day a brave new woman like Kim Kardashian would liberate the whole of her sex by oiling herself up naked on the cover of a magazine – one of the most sexist pieces of self-advertising I’ve ever seen.
But humour is an insidious thing, the ASA is bound to warn in their new report. Because “while advertising is only one of many factors that contribute to unequal gender outcomes”, Parker points out, “tougher advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole”. And I’d be tempted to give that man a standing ovation were it not for the inconvenient fact that genders – even the new made-up ones – are, by definition, “unequal” in that they are not the same.
And, by the way, if adverts are your moral guide and ethical barometer in life, something is deeply amiss. Because here’s the thing: these people are not pedagogues and sages; they are trying to sell you things. And they will do whatever it takes, cater to the lowest common denominator and awaken the basest impulse to that aim.
So, yes, they should be monitored and held accountable for the messages they put out there – but no, they’re not about to right any of our great cultural or societal wrongs.