Blog 3 - Ads & Gender

Advertisements & Gender

This week the readings discussed advertising and its effects on viewers of different genders and sexualities. Each article tackles a different viewpoint of this topic. I found Danae Clark’s piece, “Commodity Lesbaianism”, to very interesting because it did not just talk about lesbians and advertising, but gay men and advertising. As a gay man, it was interesting to read. However, Gloria Steinem's piece, “Sex, Lies, and Advertising”, was the most influential. She breaks down the advertising schemes and includes an immense amount of quotes from different sources. In the end, the articles explore the true nature of advertising in this country.

 Gloria Steinem begins her piece with a line that really got me thinking. She said, “Suppose archaeologists of the future dug up women’s magazines and used them to judge American women. What would they think of us--and what can we do about it?”. Right off the bat I was curious to know what Gloria was going to say. I was thinking it was going to be about how women are explicitly exposed in the media. They show their entire bodies--are constantly over sexualized. I suppose my idea played a small role in what Ms. Steinem goes on to say. She goes on to get to the main point of the piece, saying, “... it isn’t just a little content that’s devoted to attracting ads; it’s almost all of it”. Before reading this piece, I had figured that content was created by media outlets and then advertisers would create ads that matched up with that content. I knew that media outlets changed some of their content, so they can work with advertising companies because the advertisers are the ones financially responsible. However, Gloria informed me that the media companies create their content to fit the advertisements. The ad companies are the main source of income for all media outlets. Thus, they control everything that is produced. This means that nothing is for entertainment or organically created. Everything shown has been carefully crafted to manipulate the viewer into feeling the urge to buy something. It is really depressing to think about, but also makes perfect sense. Money rules everything.

 In Commodity Lesbianism, author Danae Clark notes that lesbians are looked at as not being economically powerful. I beg to differ. I think companies are missing out on at least 5% of the population. It might not be massive, but lesbians like woman, so all advertising companies have to do is tweak their content to subliminally appeal to lesbians, while openly connecting to the heterosexual woman. Anyways, it is believed that lesbians are not easily identifiable. I believe if companies really wanted their money, then they would study the lesbian community and figure out some generalizations. Danae also mentioned the new found interest in the gay male population, especially those who are described as the, “... white, single, well-educated, well-paid man who happens to be homosexual”. I happen to be a gay, white, single, possibly well educated male American. What does this mean for me? What have I been brainwashed with? After all, this article was published in 1995, when I was not even a year old. It has been 23 years since this article was published, and a lot can progress in 23 years.

Today, I do see a difference in the advertisements. There are ones that are fully directed towards gay men, like Calvin Klein, Pure, Prep, Logo TV, Wowpresents, etc. Calvin Klein ads exploit the man body to grab the gay male audience want to be with the men, while manipulating heterosexual males by  making them want to be the men in the ads. There are also networks like Logo TV and Wowpresents. They specialize in gay messaging, which means the advertisements have to be geared towards gay audiences. On those channels, I ran into advertisements for a male fiber supplement, Pure for Men. This entails a bottle with simple clean packaging and text.

Pure For Men twitter photo 09/21/2018

Simplistic features is often seen as something liked by a gay man. It is also has the slogan, “Stay Ready”, which obviously is saying make sure you are always clean for sex at any moment in time. Pure is targeting gay men by having porn stars and drag queens in the advertisements. Another example would be the gay television station, Logo. It is one of the only gay networks on Cablevision and thus there are a lot of gay driven advertisements. One is for a travel company by the name of Al and Chuck. They promote their company as a gay male driven travel company, and tend to also use drag queens to promote during commercial breaks for shows like Rupaul's Drag Race. You can even see Orbitz advertisements on drag race, as well.