Posts Tagged ‘commercials’

So, I spent most of today fiddling with this WordPress blog and having the TV on in the background.  The Food Channel was on for an obnoxious amount of time, and then I switched to, I think, We TV, where there was, apparently, a Golden Girls marathon going on.  In the course of all this TV viewing, I caught a lot of commercials.  Most of these commercials were for household products (cleaning and cooking) and for baby products (diapers, formula, etc.).  And I noticed an interesting trend: The primary figures in the commercials are all women.

So I decided to do some really informal research to see if this was indeed the case.  I’m focusing on just cleaning commercials and baby product commercials; I can leave the cooking commercials for another time.  Anyway, I went on Youtube and pulled up a number of Swiffer commercials, which you can find under the “Read more…” cut.  Of the eight commercials that I’ve included, none of them have men in a position where they are actively cleaning; in fact, if men are even involved in the commercials at all, they’re on the side of the brooms, mops, feather dusters, etc. that are portrayed as being obsolete as compared to the Swiffer, meaning that they aren’t cleaning.  The only instance where I could find a male in the active role of cleaning was on the Swiffer website, which includes an advice section from Patrick Brown on how to maintain wood furniture (which can be found here).

Clorox Wipes commercials can be a little harder to decipher.  The ones featuring a new design don’t have people using the product; however, the narrator is female, and the hands that pull out the wipes are feminine.  The commercial featuring kids also doesn’t explicitly show a woman cleaning as a central role, although the viewer can make out a feminine form cleaning up.  Additionally, the mermaid commercial (which has awesome music, by the way) doesn’t show any cleaning, but, again, narration is with a female voice and the only characters in the commercial are girls and women.  The Greenworks and toothbrush commercial, though, fall more into the pattern of the usual cleaning product commercial and show a woman wiping away at a mess.

Even Mr. Clean commercials don’t have a man scrubbing away hard at any messes, despite the male mascot.  Both commercials that I found on Youtube followed pretty much the same formula as the ones above.  I won’t inundate you with more cleaning commercials; I think it’s fairly clear from the ones I’ve gathered and from your own experience that the vast majority of them hardly even contain men, nevermind men actually cleaning something.

There are some occasional exceptions to this, though.  I did find a Windex commercial where a man was wiping at a window.  But that’s about it.

Now, onto baby product commercials.  The majority of these kinds of commercials have a mother lovingly bonding with her infant.  I’m pretty tired of watching commercials at this point, so I’m just going to include a few commercials by Huggies.  A lot of them are actually not from the US (for some reason, a user on Youtube compiled a playlist of Huggies commercials, so I drew from there—I didn’t include videos where the only characters were babies, as they weren’t relevant).  The first three ads (Cantonese, American English, and the first ad in Spanish) included typical mother-infant bonding.  I was very surprised to see a dad at all in the ad from New Zealand, although the “bonding” in that video isn’t quite the intimate bonding that’s typical of other commercials; same for the second ad in Spanish.  I also found it interesting that the Huggies commercials in Spanish had a male narrator, which I don’t think I’ve noticed in American commercials.  I also did find one Huggies commercial—the most famous one, apparently—where it was a man trying to control a baby who was just peeing geysers.  (Not even kidding; check the videos section.)  While the main character was a guy—very surprising—the commercial was still done in a light, humorous tone, absent of intimate bonding.

It’s a bit difficult to find commercials for baby products on Youtube, as Youtube is more geared towards amusing commercials, and the baby commercials are fairly straightforward.  Maybe somebody who wants to do more in-depth research can go and scout out the commercials I’m thinking of, where the mom is blowing raspberries on the baby’s stomach or doing some other close bonding activity.

Am I surprised by any of these findings?  Hell no.  I feel that the American social structure is still very much grounded in predefined gender roles, and these commercials are just confirming that.

But am I disappointed?  Yes.  (The following comments are going to apply to the mainstream, heteronormative married/long-term cohabitating partnerships that are predominant in American culture and that these commercials appeal to.)  I’m disappointed that we don’t portray men cleaning in commercials and that these commercials reinforce the idea of cleaning and housework being the woman’s role when it could easily be shared between the spouses, especially when the trend nowadays is that men and women both work and both have equally as busy schedules; women don’t really have the time to devote to housekeeping 24/7, and, if both partners have tight schedules, then I’d find it only logical that the workload is shared equally.

I’m further disappointed that fathers aren’t portrayed as loving their children in the same way that mothers do.  Fathers are just as important as mothers, I feel, in the childrearing process, and fathers are just as capable of that kind of close, intimate love.  Reinforcing this idea that childrearing is women’s business seems, to me, to just distance fathers from the whole process when they’re actually integral.  And the same comments from the cleaning bit apply—mothers are starting to work more and to have tight schedules, and to expect a mom to both work a regular 9–5 job and spend hours upon hours caring for her kids (while the dad is just expected to work 9–5) seems to be demanding superhuman ability and to be unfair and unequal.  Why not show dads taking on some of that work and responsibility?

Why not portray to boys, teens, and men the image of men cleaning and caring for children as something normal and positive so that there’s less of a stigma on it?  (By which I mean, I’m sure there’s a segment of the male population that is very hesitant to do housework because they view it as the woman’s job and, therefore, a threat to their masculinity, should they be caught cleaning.)  Why not show men having healthy and positive relationships with infants and children instead of fostering this culture that says that a man in the company of children is immediately bad company, a pedophile?

Honestly, I see nothing but good coming out of having gender roles that are more lenient.  It would certainly be much more egalitarian, and it would really reduce a lot of stress on the woman’s behalf.  I really don’t see any real threats to masculinity or femininity from making gender roles less strict (and if a pair does want to stick to gender roles and it works for them and both parties are happy with the setup, then, by all means, go for it).

As I said, this was a really informal study that I did out of my own curiosity.  I’m not even properly citing the Youtube videos or anything, and Youtube’s not the best source, as it doesn’t catalogue all the commercials that are aired.  My commentary is just from my own speculation, and I don’t have much to ground it on, and it’s essentially an opinion.  But if anybody does have links to scholarly articles that have studied this, I’d definitely be interested in reading them.  Drop a link in the comments or something.

Thanks for reading this!  Click the “Read more…” link for links to the Youtube videos.

EDIT: My friend Sean has provided me with a link to a meta-analysis of a number of empirical studies on this exact topic: Eisend, Martin.  “A meta-analysis of gender roles in advertising.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science Online First (2009): n. pag.  Web.  26 Nov. 2009.  <http://www.springerlink.com/content/k760037878221477/fulltext.html>  Thanks so much!  I’m excited to read it.

(more…)