Gender and Ideology in Advertising

The basic objective of the article is to show that despite claims of great advances along the road to equality of the sexes, such advances are far from being as great as they are claimed to be. Since advertising is, by definition, a carrier of social values, since what one buys and does not buy depends, ultimately, on one’s (perhaps unconscious and certainly underlying) values, (hence the underlying ideology), the approach adopted is to analyse advertising over a span of approximately 40 years, (1960-2000 circa), and two thematic domains, (household products and entertainment – two ideologically “critical” areas), using the tools of stylistics and multimodality in order to show that the way women are presented and “used” in advertising reveals an underlying value system which is still patriarchally oriented, where women remain an object of sexual desire and subordinated to the desires of men. The issue is not simply a sexual one, but sexual gender roles are symbolic of gender roles in society in general, namely of female subordination. After an introductory discussion of ideology, discourse and feminism, (including a brief overview of the ideological “history” of soap – one of the advertised products analysed to demonstrate that such a discourse has deep roots, together with links to sociological and socio-economic investigations related to the positioning of the Self in modern society) the tools of stylistic and multimodal analysis are employed are outlined, and the advertisements are then scrutinised in depth accordingly. The results obtained show that while the subject position of the female as constructed in these advertisements changes from one of “angel of the household” serving the patriarchal family, to sexually and psychologically dominant female “ensnaring” the male, the apparent transformation of the woman from subordinate to dominant is in actual fact a fiction, for in “ensnaring” the male she remains the subordinate protagonist in the patriarchal view of gender roles.