Advertising is use to promotes a product, service or event to its target audience by using visual printing, voice, text or graphic. (Sheri Cyprus,2010). For past year ago, advertising is using creative idea and graphic to grab the attention from audience, but nowadays, everyone are using sexist as a selling point, especially making something that are derogatory towards women.
Based on Kathryn Perera, 2010 indicated that advertising are plays on gender stereotypes now. Many ads have a sexist and offensive tone or content especially showing the how sexy of women. Usually this is hidden behind a semblance of subtlety: the nakedness of the female character is loosely connected to the product in question; the gender stereotype is reinforced in an indirect or "knowing" way. These sexist images is become a part of our modern life, the sexist images of women are becoming more and more common.
Besides the humiliate images about women, some of the text on advertisement are totally showing gender stereotyping, especially for women. For example, The campaign of World Cup advertising, wrote that "EXPLAIN YOUR FOOTBALL PASSION TO THE MISSUS. IF YOU CAN GET A SIGNAL IN SOUTH AFRICA" which mean, women are stupid, no matter how many ways are you using to explain the football passion to your girl’s friend, she will not receive the message from you, just like the poor signal in South Africa (Kathryn Perera , 2010).
 |
| www.cpltraining.co.uk/fruit/default.aspx |
Looking at such advertisements, occasionally, they main contain different group of information on the same page. In many times, the upper section of the page visualizes the ‘promise of the product’, the status of glamour it can gives on its users, or the sensory fulfillment it can bring. The lower section presents the product itself, providing some factual information about it or where it can be obtained. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen (1998), the concept of Ideal and Real, explains the information value of top and bottom page of an advertisement. They mentioned that the upper section tends to make some kind of emotional appeal and to show us ‘what might be’; while the lower section tends to be more informative and practical, showing us the ‘what is’.
In my opinion, the concept of gender stereotyping are based on the different background of people with different knowledge even culture, so their view of the gender stereotyping which in differently. Me, myself as a Chinese, the view of the gender stereotyping in Chinese is more concern on traditional and serious way. As a traditional Chinese man even people in new trend, their mind concept is ‘women have to stay at home as a housewife rather than learn more things than men’. According to Schriver (1997, pg. 364) indicated that an individual act in that it depends critically on the reader’s (advertiser and people who sexism) unique knowledge, attitudes, and values.
Next, to avoid the gender stereotype in advertising even anywhere, we have to think some useful idea to solve the problem. Such as, provide the rights of women and bans the advertisement that relate with sexual, drugs and immoral suggestions.
References List
- Kathryn Perera 2010, [online], Time to Kick Sexism Out of Advertising, viewed 7 Nov 2010, available at:
- Shriver K.A 1997, Dynamics In Document Design, Creating Text for Readers: The Interplay of Words and Pictures: The Immediacy of Interpretation, Ch.6, pp. 364, Wiley Computer Pub., New York
- Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen (1998): 'Front Pages: (The Critical) Analysis of Newspaper Layout'. In Allan Bell & Peter Garrett (Eds.): Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.
No comments:
Post a Comment