Gender Stereotypes In Advertising Essay

In commercials and advertisements you always see big brand name companies portraying genders in both a negative and positive way. You don’t really think about the underlying messages that the media puts out there, due to their catchy jingles and slogans. No matter how degrading advertisement strategies are, the main goal of all is to reel in customers and sell their products. Advertisements usually reel in their buyers by promoting controversial messages with modified images, or insulting phrases,and as a result, it opened eyes on how women are perceived in the media, tarnishing what power they had, however, there are some cases where companies aren’t aware of what they’re putting out. Even though some cleaning ads are unaware of how stereotypical their ads are, stereotyping women this way portrays them negatively by depicting them as useless, seeing their only real power as cleaning, and implies women should be restricted to home. Cleaning advertisements dismissively depict women in a way where they are persuading a female audience in believing that a woman belongs in the kitchen and therefore, causes more sales. The “get the power” Clorox ad (Fig. 1) was produced around the 1940’s during the civil war. Women of this time were influenced by rosie the riveter “We can do it” and started taking over jobs men had left behind to join the war. Clorox …show more content…
Clorox stands true to this when you compare the original rosie the riveter to Clorox’s. The woman is thinned out, they added makeup and nail polish and they even gave her a wedding ring. These key characteristics strongly suggest that the wives of the household do the labor with their only power being to clean, whereas, the rest of the power goes to “the man of the house” making women appear