gender ads

http://www.genderads.com/

Gender Ads.com was begun a number of years ago to provide gender studies educators and students with a resource for analyzing the advertising images that relate to gender.

Its founder, Dr. Scott A. Lukas, had produced a PowerPoint that focused on gender and advertising, and because students had requested copies of the presentation, he decided to produce a website to host the images and interpretations.

Since the PowerPoint was produced with 100 images, the website has grown to over 2,500 advertising images, and it is one of the largest collections of gender-related advertising materials on the Internet.

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body
Background: A popular theme in both advertising and mainstream movies is of the male as a decision-maker and the female as a passive, uninvolved body (cf. Culley and Bennett 1976).

Even in mainstream magazines, advertising rarely depicts women in other roles (Sexton and Haberman 1974).

Advertising is capricious, and in some cases particular depictions of men and women have shifted over the years. An example of this trend occurred in 1970s ads where the stereotypical objectified images of women were supplanted in part by images of women in business and executive settings.

However, as two authors argue, such representations have ultimately faded away to the more traditional depictions of women as sex objects (Benokraitis and Feagin 1995:28).
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Background: “In spite of the inferior role which men assign to them, women are the privileged objects of their aggression,” this the telling quote offered by Simone de Beauvoir (in Kaufman 1995:17) that establishes one of the essential problems in patriarchal societies—men commit violence against women.

The connection between masculinity and violence has been considered in a number of significant studies of popular culture (Gibson 1994; Ewing 1995; Kaufman 1995).

Kaufman suggests that the substitution of violence for desire is a predominant aspect of the construction of masculinity (1995:13), Benokraitis and Feagin suggest that advertising often connects sexuality with aggression or violence against women (1995:61), while Wolf (1991:133) discusses “beauty sadomasochism”—the prevalence of violence and sex in many ads.
violence