Tonight I was briefly annoyed by a women's deodorant commercial. The company in the ad asked women to wear bells on their wrist for an entire day to show how much they move (wow, great set up, I'm hooked!), then went into some fancy science about motion activated deodorant. It was a weird commercial, but I wrote it off as one of the many ads aiming *so* high to capture the sophisticated women's intellect. Here is the British version of the commercial:
A few minutes later, I saw a commercial for men's deodorant that framed sweating in a completely different way: it featured "great men of history," working up a sweat doing important manly things like inventing cool things and ruling a country. I couldn't find the exact commercial, but watch the one below and you get the idea. The contrast between these two commercials is what made me start to think...
Obviously, marketers have long employed gendered advertising, especially for personal care products. First, it seems like products are either labeled "normal"/"regular" and "women's" separately, thus establishing masculinity as the norm, and femininity as the deviation. Second, general products are becoming less and less unisex (coming soon: toothpaste for women?).
So I know it's pretty bad that these commercials reinforce gender roles in such an obvious way and setting up women for low expectations (woo, riding public transportation, biking, tennis, and... what's that?... shaking out a rug? yay!), but I also know there's not much I can do about it. And hey, at least we've stopped believing that period sweat is toxic, right? Right... thus, I present you with some of my favorite internet things poking fun and gendered beauty products.
The timeless Sarah Haskins on the technoscience-beauty-industrial-complex:
Sociological Images and Stephen Colbert on, "Is your armpit unattractive?"
And finally, based on the Hyperbole and a Half comic, "Shower products for men":
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