Social Dichotomy Of Gender In Advertising

Today, advertising in media is nigh impossible to avoid by shear design. The bombardment of professionally photoshopped women in magazines and the number of chocolate-eating women and burger-eating men seems too much for the American psyche. Authors Riddi Shah and F. Diane Barth write about the quirks of the social dichotomy of gender in American society today. Advertising in American magazines has lead to women envying others and overall the genders separating themselves needlessly. Due to the pervasiveness of advertising and its empirically shown effects on the psychological aspects of this nation, it is not too brash to assume that it is at least a factor in this social phenomenon of gendering. The effects of this advertising can be seen …show more content…
Advertisements for beer and particular luxury items hit men the hardest. Implications that you are not a man unless you drink this certain beer or wear that expensive suit are damaging to the male psyche. Women are told that they are not sexy unless they eat this type of chocolate or use that certain perfume. They are both meant to have perfectly ‘toned, tight’ bodies to be ideal.(Gauntlett) Who are they to contend? They see these in every magazine they read, and even those who do not read magazines cannot escape from the displays at grocery checkout lines. Author Riddhi Shah explains in “Men Eat Meat, Women Eat Chocolate: How Food Gets Gendered” that this is an American problem. We have always been a society that focuses on a boy-girl attitude. There are things left to girls and things left to boys and that is the end of it. Despite there being no biological reason for this dichotomy of food tastes, Shah explains that people still feel the need to prove their manliness or femininity by consuming that which fits their ideas of manliness and femininity. (Shah) Advertisers prey on this weakness, perpetuating the feeling by creating a dialogue of gendered food in the American …show more content…
Media can influence us all the way down to the basic instinctual feelings about the other genders. By using gender ratios and the biological market theory, advertisements can make you believe that their product will win you, or that others will lose you, chances at obtaining mates. By slamming the public with images of groups of women surrounding a specific beer holding man, or groups of men crowding around a certain perfume wearing woman, the media can easily influence our psyche. (Taylor) These effects hit teenagers the hardest. Numerous studies have shown that adolescents are particularly susceptible to media and advertising, and to devastating effects. If this characteristic were to transfer to gender and identity, which it has, the gendering in our society would kick off earlier than one would think. This is no hypothetical, unfortunately, for studies show that teenagers have already fallen prey to advertisements depicting drunkenness and romantic relationships, believing them to go hand in hand.