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Example research essay topic: 19 Th Century Portrayal Of Women - 3,185 words

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The general view of women as an audience in advertising hanover been taken particularly seriously. The history of womens portrayal in advertising has commonly been reflected in society. In the late 19 th century, the expansion of capitalism made mass production a possibility in the USA. This led to increased amounts of advertising. At that time, adverts were looked upon as working a trivial and irrational way.

Because of this, they were seen to work on women more effectively. This reflected how women were viewed by society. Freedom wissen as something that would appeal to women, and this manifested itself in luxurious department stores. These became womens clubs or Schools for consumption (Pumphrey, 1984) that replaced traditionally male oriented retail.

The 1920 s saw US advertisers trying to change the buying habits of their consumers (mainly women). They attempted to do this by using traditional gender roles and the social psychology of First World War propaganda. Women we redivided into and invited to relate to two gender roles that of the housewife and that the flapper. The housewife was shown to be modern figure with a very important, albeit unpaid, job, who through advertisements could take advantage of the latest technological advances. This role model invited self-surveillance and encouraged the female consumer to improve her home and appearance with the products advertised. The other limited role model for women of that time was The flapper.

This figure, portrayed in films, magazines, etc. was an alternative to the conventional 19 th century view of femininity, though generally on a style and image level rather than on political level. Pumphrey described this figure as wearing unencumbered simplified clothing, with short hair and a boyish figure. She thought that her rebellious lifestyle and pursuit of pleasure made her an important cultural figure. The type of adverts I am going to examine are domestic advertisements. These are generally adverts for cleaning products such as washing up liquid and detergent.

These adverts, I believe, are generally aimed at the housewife figure in advertising markets. A typical example of this type of advertisement is that Flash Bathroom, currently showing on British television. The advert begins with the male figure in the house hold lying inthe bath. His wife knocks on the door and asks him if he is still slobbing in thebans? The camera cuts to the dirty bathroom. He claims he is cleaning the bathroom for her.

She is pleasantly surprised, seemingly for two reasons. Firstly, as a typical male figure in advertising, he does little, if no, housework, and secondly, she is undertake, seemingly false, impression that cleaning the bathroom is a difficult and arduous affair. When he has finished his bath, he cleans the bathroom using the advertised product. He finishes it quickly and easily (supposedly quicker than conventional cleaners. ) She rewards him for his efforts with extra affection. This advert, though clearly aimed at housewives, implies that a man knows best, even in an area he has little or no contact with. The characters clothes are an important factor in the studying ofthe semiotics of this advert.

The woman in this advert is wearing a towel, (the signifier. ) As she is not in the bathroom, it is unclear as to why this is, although indies denote images linked with the advertised product, ie. bathrooms. It also allows for exposure of her shoulders, upper chest and legs. It is relevant in the study of the sexual connotations that can be drawn from this advert. The towel she is wearing is peach coloured and from this I drew connotations of softness and femininity.

This, Instead, is not a colour connected with the independence of a woman unburdened blouse work. He, on the other hand, is wearing an all covering toweling robe in masculine black and white stripes. He is not dressed to be any kind of sex symbol, unlike his wife. I think that the producers intention was to market the product using a figure that society saw as knowledgeable. The character used wasn t a typical person to connect with knowledge, as they displayed signs of foolishness and misfortune. In fact, the only characteristic the actor had that society might typically link to increased intelligence and reliability was the fact he was a man.

This further, undermined the status of women in a way that normal house wife orientated adverts fail to do. Over the years many associations have been made between adverts and their products and sex. The introduction of television saw marketers focus eight hidden needs, most of which could be reduced to sex. Concentrating on these needs was seen to have a great effect on the advertising market.

Connections went even further than that, and one market researcher even went as far as to suggest that housewives did not like macaroni which cooked to a wet sticky mass because wet sticky masses aroused sexual guilt in them Some of these theories, perhaps rightly so, have been greeted with skepticism, but I think it is undisputed that adverts are full of overt and subtle sexual connotations. The sexual associations in the advert are subtle but overall, artery significant. The clothes are the main signifier's in this advert and the fact that the female figure is more uncovered than the male character is quite telling as to who these symbol is expected to be in this advert. Another sexual association that could became from this advert is the rewards that the male figure receives for his efforts in the bathroom. When his wife sees the bathroom and how hard he has worked on it, her reward for him is kisses, hugs and general affection. This, in a way, suggests that mean expect certain rewards for efforts outside their normal gender role.

I think it is interesting that women are not encouraged to expect the same, if any, rewards when they cross stereotype boundaries and go out to work. Studies that are made about other types of mass media, such assays are also relevant when studying advertisements, as the characters portrayed inches reflect heavily on advertisements and vice versa. D. M. Meehans study of Characters of Prime Time Television refers to 1960 s mass media. She suggests thatcher are essentially only ten female characters in this type of media including such figures as The Harpy, The Good wife, The Bitch, The Victim, etc.

The 1970 s brought the study of Liberal feminism and numerous quantitative content analyses have shown womens lack of appearance in the mass media in general. They have, however, shown the types of roles, however limited, that women appear in. In these roles, women are seen as a wife, mother, daughter or girlfriend. Under these roles women are shown to work in traditionally female jobs such as a secretary or nurse.

The other main role women come under, obviously, is the sex object. These women are usually young and attractive, but not very well educated. (Tuchman, 1978. ) This had generally been put down to a lack of female journalists in the field, but later research (Creedon, 1989) has shown that the addition of women to the media has reduced the salaries and status of the profession rather than contribute towards a more realistic portrayal of women in advertising. This is suggested, by radical feminists, tobe because consumer capitalism has a vested interest keeping power over women. These examples of female character studies over the last thirty to forty years seem toyshop that gender roles have actually changed very little. Although they suggest increased amounts of feminizing in the media, the actual roles in which females are represented appear to be the same old stereotypes. There are some positive female role models in the media andadvertisng.

To elaborate on the differences between them, I will describe and analyse two different domestic adverts. The first example is another advert which I considered portray women in a negative light. This is an advert for Bold washing and softening powder. The advert begins with a man cooking steaks on the barbecue.

His wife joins him in the garden, only to see that he has burnt the food. She accuses him being wasteful and tells him to go to the shop and buy some more. She also instructs him to buy other items on the shopping list that she gives him. He and their young son go to the supermarket and while there, notice that buying washing powder and a separate softener is more expensive than buying Bold. They return home with their purchases. The next shot is the wife hanging out the washing.

She comments onthe cleanliness and softness and says I bet that Bold cost a lot. The husband then informs her that because it doesnt contain a separate softener, it was over a quid less. The last shot is her hand holding the change, and her commenting on the extra money she will have to spend. This advert, like the Flash advert, shows men doing domestic tasks. This at face value seems positive, but the way they are presented further undermines the idea of a competent woman. The first domestic job he is seen doing is cooking.

He burns the food which shows he is unable to perform this task. This emphasises the role of the woman as the housewife figure. Once having established the females role, the producer then aims to undermine the womans ability by making the male, clearly inept at household tasks, the knowledgeable figure when it comes thrashing powder and family finance. This advert contained many of the sexist qualities that the Flash advert had, because it reinforces the already stereotypical view of the housewife and makes the man appear the most knowledgeable.

The catchphrase of the advert, Better buy Bold, also reinforced an earlier point that domestic advertising encouraged self surveillance. That sentence basically tells the domesticated member of the family that by not buying Bold they are making bad financial and consumer decisions. The second advert I chose to study was almost the complete opposite. It was an advert for Ariel washing powder. In this advert, the mother is pictured sitting on the sofa in a seemingly middle class living room. Her son comes carrying a big bag.

She asks him how the rock festival was. He says he enjoyed it. She looks in his bag and finds a very dirty shirt. She says in my day, things were different we didnt wear any clothes.

The closing shot is that of the box, and the phrase, Relax, Ariel will get it clean. While on the surface, this advert appears to support the stereotype of the domestic female, her comments about her past as a rock loving, naked, free thinking woman show she has, or at least had, another life outside the home, free from domestic responsibilities. The mothers clothes in this advert are leggings and a jumper. She is also wearing glasses, perhaps to signify age. She is clearly not wearing the clothes of a sex symbol in the scenes that you can see her in, but her referral to her past as a young, nude, woman suggests a sex symbol of some sort. The fact that she has not felt the need to keep up her sex symbol image will probably be a relief to Dowling who commented on the burn out symptoms that women might experience when trying to do just that.

Although the two adverts both have telling subtexts, they vary immensely in what they add to the role of women inthe adverts. There are several ways in which the producer of an advert can identify and select their audience. In the past, the hypodermic syringe model washed. This was an effects model that was used to analyse audience responses.

Ittheorised that audiences irrational and heavily effected by all that they saw in thomas media. , They were consequently seen to be unaffected by class, race, etc. Contemporary marketing, however, has seen the recognition of a more discerning audience and the users and gratification s model is seen to be more accurate. This model theorized that audiences were entirely capable of making informed choices, completely unaffected by the mass media. Because of this, many different things a retaken into consideration when targeting an audience of, for instance, women. Oneway of determining an audiences buying habits is by class. A common way to determine this is by using the JICNARS (Joint Industry Committee for National Readership Surveys. ) Though originally used to gain magazine and newspaper audiences it is now widely used amongst other media and includes categories such as Group C 2: blue-collar, skilled working class, and Group A: upper middle class, e.

g. successful business or professional. Another way to identify audiences is through geography. For thistle ACORN (A Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods) is often used. This uses postcodes or national census returns to divide audiences.

Other, more specific warfare used to define audiences, such as Psycho graphic profiles. These use questionnaires containing phrases for the respondents to agree or disagree with such A woman s place is in the home. Another way is by using focus groups to determine a very particular audiences views by asking them their feelings on a particular product and the images that come to mind when thinking about it. Once all these aspects are taken into consideration, a target group is established. In the case of the Flash advert, I think the housewife is the target, mainly because they are in charge of making most domestic, consumer decisions. The scheduling or placement of the advert is vital.

When targeting a housewife, as the producer of the Flash bathroom advert clearly was, the scheduling is probably the most important aspect of the product s marketing. First the producer will identify the time the typical housewife will be watching. After, and around soaps are a common time to put on the adverts. This is because soaps are seen to appeal to a largely female audience, due to the relationship orientated content and the lack of seriousness in these programmes. Adverts will not be scheduled around political documentaries or serious drama, as women are not thought to watch this type of program. Domestic adverts, aimed at the housewife, will also be scheduled in there general time slot of Coffee Time - (0925 1229) and Afternoon (1230 1714) because these are seen as times when the children are supposedly at school and the husband at work.

On the numerous occasions I saw this advert over the course of my research, it was scheduled around general daytime television and soaps, and across around time span of between nine and five. Other products aimed at this target groupware shown around this time too, like cosmetics, shampoo, etc. The link between these products and domestic adverts is that they both encourage the self-surveillance previously mentioned. As the study of my three adverts has shown, the subtexts can often be the most important aspect to study. Especially when examining messages and subtle character stereotypes.

As I have mentioned above, the angle of the adverts can change completely when the subtext is explored and understood. Intertextuality isas important in the understanding of media texts. It is not very relevant in the adverts that I studied, in fact there was only one reference to another media text. This was the reference to Glastonbury in the Ariel advert. Although this is not strictly another media text, you would probably have had to have seen some kind of news programme or other media on this to understand what it was. The effects of adverts in general is important in the conclusion of the essay.

A lot of the early study of the effects of advertising was contained in The Pilkington Report. This report, though now seen as crude, provided early insight intothe effects of mass media and advertising in its newest form the television commercial. This type of advertising was seen as enormously persuasive and its effects were explored by politicians and academics alike. People were seen to make irrational and subconscious decisions when affected by advertisements. People were also seen to buy as a way to rid the anxieties created by the needs that the adverts produced, ie.

worries about cleanliness. The women and working class were seen tobe most effected by advertising as they were connected with a lack of intelligence and rationality. The latter were also seen to be affected by a need to modify their buying habits due to the class movement of the fifties. This, at first, appeared to be proved, with shops selling out of advertised goods.

This however, appears to have been a temporary effect. It was later recognised that audiences were not as passive as once thought and their buying habits were affected by age, class, beliefs, etc. The Pilkington Report also stated that advertising reinforces attitudes of materialism. This is now heavily disregarded and advertising is seen to change peoples perceptions and reinforce fantasies. Later deconstructions of advertising and its effects on audiences was based around several effects models. These included the hypodermic syringe model which supported the view that audiences were mindless and easily manipulated.

Another model was also the users and gratifications model. This models at the other end of the scale completely and suggested that audiences were unaffected by advertising and the mass media in general. These, as with the other models, are also seen as deeply flawed theories. Another type of effect advertising has is to manipulate television schedules. Strong pressure is put onto television companies to create regular and predictable audience for them to fit their advertising schedules around.

An example otis is the human ising and personal ising of documentary programmes in an effort to attract a wider female audience. More specific effects have been felt by women due to advertising and the characters built up around it. Dowling (1989) commented on the negative effects of seemingly positive female role models in the media. She suggested that role reversal and equal characters had created a type of fictional super woman. She commented that the creation of an independent and assertive career woman, a successful wife mother, who is still beautiful and has kept the body she had as a girls perfect shape, caused real women who were trying to live up to this image to end suffering from serious burn out symptoms.

Another view of negative effects of advertising on the image of women is supported by Radical feminists. Their contribution to the argument is that although the medias effect cannot be proven beyond question, there can be no doubt that media distortion contributes to a general climate of discrimination and abuse of women, (Davies, 1988. ) The fact that companies spend as much money as they do on advertising is basically proof of its effects. This makes the portrayal of women in this media increasingly worrying. Even with it being supposedly more forward thinking towards gender stereotypes, all the media texts that I studied had during my research had overt and subtle stereotypical characters, be it the housewife or the sex symbol. 35 f


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Research essay sample on 19 Th Century Portrayal Of Women

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