Advertising Gender Roles

The use of advertising in mass media communication to convey messages has played a crucial role in our modern day society and even in a 1960’s context. In short, advertising is the art of persuading an audience to buy into an idea or a product. As such, advertisements are designed to impact the audience into thinking a certain way. In the 1960’s, the idea of gender roles and stereotypes in society was very prevalent specifically towards woman where they were consigned to roles such as housewives, consumeristic in nature and an overexploitation of their sexuality and this was significantly perpetuated by advertisements. The chosen text is titled “Keep her where she belongs”(Keep Her Where She Belongs), an advertisement that appears to be selling

Furthermore, the idea that women were below men in social stature was a prevalent idea where they were seen to be materialistic, nothing more than a housewife and sexuality constantly exploited essentially consigning them to a minimal role in society where men were seen to be stronger and more powerful than women. With gender roles being such a hot topic in the 1960’s media and more specifically advertising, was a clear reflection of societal sentiment where the media exploited that societal sentiment in order to sell a product. In this case, the woman’s sexuality is used in order to attract a male consumer to buy a shoe which further shows how advertising has used these gender roles and women’s low social stature through objectification in order to sell to the larger

This is due to the drastic societal swing on the outlook of women in society. Nowadays, unlike in the 1960’s, women are seen to be more powerful, they are much more than just housewives or simply materialistic. Due to the change in society’s perception of gender roles, if this advertisement was to be released in a 21st century society, it would have to avoid consigning women to such a materialistic level as the original advertisement does. The 1960’s advertisement is very open about its sexist approach which is a clear reflection on society. However, if kept the same for a 21st century society, this would most probably lead to public outcry and the death of the firm solely due to the change in perception of gender roles. Although society’s outlook on gender roles has changed, an important aspect to note is that the approach and basic concept of sexuality that advertising adopts has not drastically changed from that of 50 years ago, there are still striking similarities that can be clearly