Media and advertising are extremely toxic in many ways because its a reflection of the utopian desires of some that create and project societal beauty standards and aesthetic principles onto many. Whether this be the beautiful love interest in a romantic comedy, or the buff actor on the Axe Body Spray commercial, we’ve all seen the constant generalizations and depictions of the human experience and how we are all supposed to be.
“It’s very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, ‘This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.’ And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.”
Hugh Grant
In advertising women are from Venus and men are from Mars. Advertisers use the idea that men and women are inherently different to develop stories, create conflict, and provide persuasive imagery to sell products that differentiate the male experience from the female experience. Most people are only shown imagery of what the ideal is, what’s supposedly “normal,” as if there’s one way to live correctly. Advertising buys into society’s utopian depictions to sell people products that may create the life that is spoon fed to them as perfect. Because of the society that has been created, advertising based on stereotypes has always been existent and has furthered gender norms exponentially. Since the beginning of the free market, different products were made to depict a different experience between a man than a woman, and nothing in between. Even today advertising still uses this binary sort of advertising, depicting a man’s experience as something completely unique from a woman’s, yet no room for any experience that is not made through the lens of gender. A car is depicted as a “man’s car” as if driving a car is a different experience for a person based off of their gender. A mother is the face of cleaning products because that’s the traditional role women were supposed to play as if being a mother or a woman gives you an automatic desire to clean.
“The conversation on gender is shifting and it’s time that brands started listening. Generation Z is leading the way and redefining gender, making a traditional binary understanding feel outdated and out of touch. More than a third of generation Z strongly agree that gender does not define a person as much as it used to and brands will need to move on from a reliance on outdated stereotypes in advertising to stay relevant.”
Michelle Du Prat, executive strategy director at Household
Binaries: A Utopian Desire For Control Turned Dystopian 