I am completely overwhelmed. I don't know why. I'm going to finish everything that I need to finish in a timely manner, just as I always do. I just finished my Gender Studies Media Analysis. Now on the agenda:
Write a critical analysis for Literary Theory&Criticism, due Thursday.
Study critical terms and prepare critical essays for Theory and Crit final (Wed).
Write 2 page essay for Psych, due Monday.
Prepare for final exam in Psych (Mon).
Prepare for Gender Studies Media Analysis presentation (Tues&Thurs).
Prepare 3 essays for GST final (Thurs).
Meet with group for final speech (Mon&Wed).
Prepare my portion of the 20 minute speech (Mon&Wed).
Prepare for Speech final (Tomorrow, Friday).
whew.
-BUT-
at least I've finished my media analysis and only have left to submit it to turn-it-in (will do after class today, just in case she spits something I need to know for my paper at us =P)
Did I mention she wanted us to use the Chicago Style Manual and I freaked? Finally she said we could use whatever. Thank goodness, I don't want to learn a new style manual!
Anyway, attached is what I've got. It's not perfect, but I think it will suffice. See ya!
This media analysis will be on the new “you” Campaign that was launched by HTC . HTC is a Smartphone company, and the “you” campaign is an attempt to appeal to a broad audience and a wide variety of emotions. The ads are designed to be relatable, describing a multitude of scenarios with which people may identify. The focus of this media analysis will be on one particular television commercial. This ad features multiple people in multiple situations, many of which reinforce gender stereotypes. This analysis will further explore some of those situations. The ad begins by showing a man while the voiceover says, “You are trying to forget about work,” and continues to another man, while the audience hears, “while you are working late again.” The next sequence shows a woman, with the voiceover saying, “and you miss your kids,” while a clip of a man in a cab in the city says, “and you miss the waves.” As the commercial continues, a group of young men is shown, and the voiceover says, “and you need to laugh,” followed by a close-up of a young woman wiping tears from her eyes as the announcer says, “and you need to cry.” While several individuals are featured in this commercial, the analysis will cover the aforementioned scenes, which are examples of the most extreme gender stereotyping in the commercial. The HTC You campaign is attempting to appeal to human emotion and experience in attempt to sell their product, specifically playing to gender stereotypes in many of their examples. These six examples are not only strong reinforcers of gender stereotypes, but the first and most impressionable in the advertisement. These examples reinforce long-standing stereotypes such as an emotional, domesticated woman and a “breadwinning” man, demonstrating the separation of spheres.
The first two examples in the commercial, two men shown sequentially under the voiceover, “you are trying to forget about work, and you are working late again,” is a perfect example of the male “breadwinner” ideology. The ad mentions work two times, and instead of using one female example and one male example or even two female examples, two males are chosen. The first male is sitting in a stairwell and is wearing grey slacks and a button-up shirt. He’s a middle-aged Caucasian, and as he sits, he hangs up his phone. The second man shown is sitting behind a desk. He appears a younger than the first man, but is –again- a Caucasian male. He is wearing a watch and a button-up shirt. His office has a large glass window, and various papers, books, and a laptop are on his desk. As he sits leaned over his desk, he waves ‘good-night’ to the janitor who is taking out the trash from the office. The janitor is wearing a short-sleeve work uniform shirt and is a middle-aged African American with graying hair in his mustache and on his head. All three men in this sequence are shown in reference to their job. This reinforces the male “breadwinner” stereotype, because since the separation of the public and private spheres, men have been associated with the task of going into the “public sphere” and working to earn money to support his family while his wife stayed at home and took care of the family. Research supports the fact that men still dominate the work force, which is probably why this campaign chose to use males as the representatives of working adults. In “Blame It on Feminism,” written by Susan Faludi in 1991, she points out inequality that has persisted in the workforce. At the time, as Faludi points out, women “represent two-thirds of all poor adults,” that “75 percent of full-time working women make less then $20,000 a year, nearly double the male rate,” women are “far more likely than men to live in poor housing and receive no health insurance,” “twice as likely to draw no pension,” and “face one of the worst gender based pay gap[s] in the developed world” (Faludi 3-4). She points out that “the U.S. government still has no family-leave and child care programs and more than 99 percent of American private employers don’t offer child care either” (Faludi 3-4). Furthermore, women in the workplace are mostly in jobs that have always been stereotypically feminine jobs. Faludi points out that “nearly 80 percent of working women [are] still stuck in traditional ‘female’ jobs as secretaries, administrative ‘support’ workers and salesclerks” (Faludi 3-4). If most women aren’t working in typically ‘demanding’ white-collar jobs, why use them in an ad portraying seemingly stressed-out white-collar employees? Marketers are trying to create characters their consumers can relate to, and since most people in the situation being portrayed are male, certainly they will use a male actor. Only to further suggest that using a male as the relatable character to be portrayed as a middle-class working man wracked with responsibility is the notion that over half of men and women still maintain a male breadwinner ideology. A poll revealed by Time Magazine in October of 2009 shows that “Fifty-seven percent of men and 51% of women agree that it is better for a family if the father works outside the home and the mother takes care of the children” (“…And Yet, People Hold On to Traditional Visions for Family Life” 1).
The next two portrayals to be analyzed are of a man and a woman, respectively. The first is the woman, on the phone with a voiceover saying “you miss your kids;” then a man is shown riding in a cab, presumably taking pictures with his phone of the rainy city through the cab window, as the voiceover says, “you miss the waves.” The woman is relatively young, Caucasian, and standing alone against a building in the daytime, as people walk on the sidewalk behind her. The man is riding in the cab at night and has on a suit and tie. It is unclear why the woman is not with her children; she is wearing a button up shirt and a tan jacket, but is only shown from the bust up. It seems that the man is probably on a business trip because he is shown as a passenger and he is dressed nicely. The interesting fact here (besides the fact that, again, the audience is being shown a white-collar, nicely dressed, Caucasian male) is the fact that the woman misses her children and he misses “the waves”. This is clearly reinforcing the fact that women are the more “domestic” of the two sexes and is most frequently responsible for the family unit, while the man has a more carefree lifestyle outside of work, missing only his favorite recreational activity, which can be assumed as surfing (if not surfing, certainly something involving the beach). Again, the marketers are trying to appeal to people and the emotions they experience (along with their cell phones). This is another example of public sphere/private sphere. Even though the woman is in public, she is thinking about and presumably talking to her children. Women being refined to the private sphere, historically, had plenty to do with their responsibilities to their families as mothers. The man is clearly doing something job-related, which plays into his role in the public sphere, and the fact that he is missing a recreation and not a family or loved one indicates that he is single. Women are so often defined in relation to men, and a good example of this is in the Feminine Mystique, when Betty Friedan says, “the problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself” (Freidan 8). Friedan quotes “a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger marriage counseling clinic,” who says “ ‘we have made women a sex attire… She has no identity except as a wife and mother’ ” (Freidan 9). In the intro to her novel The Second Sex, , Simone de Beauvoir points this out, “man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being” (de Beauvoir 1). At the beginning of her intro, de Beauvoir says, “But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a womb’ ”(de Beauvoir 1). She says that man “respects woman as wife and mother”(de Beauvoir 9). Perhaps, then, this is why the woman being shown in the commercial is a mother and is being defined as such? Interestingly, in Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan talks about the responsibilities of housewives and how “at the end of the day, she is so terribly tired that sometimes her husband has to take over and put the children to bed ” (Freidan 10); could this be the reason the gentleman in the commercial has time to surf and the woman is preoccupied with her children?
The next sequence reinforcing gender stereotypes within the commercial begins with a group of young men and the voiceover saying, “you need to laugh,” and the cutting to a close-up of a girl wiping tears from her eyes while the voiceover continues with, “and you need to cry.” The young men are outdoors and dressed in jeans and casual tops; they are very animated with their laughter. The audience doesn’t see much detail about the girl; she is on the phone and crying, that is all shown. This very clearly plays into the stereotype that men are carefree and women are emotional (a weaker sex In “No Way My Boys Are Going To Be Like That!” by Emily W. Kane, she “[explores] how parents respond to gender nonconformity among preschool-aged children” (Kane 173). She talks about the discouragement of emotional behavior in boys from an early age, saying “along with material markers of femininity, many parents expressed concern about excessive emotionality (especially frequent crying) and passivity in their sons.” In fact, fathers of little boys who cried used phrases such as “ ‘crying like a sissy’, ‘you are such a little wean’, ‘crying like a girl’, and ‘cry like a baby’ ”(Kane 176). All of these phrases either demean the little boys for crying or gender the act of crying. Phrases such as “ ‘crying like a girl’ “ are common, and make it clear that many fathers do not find crying an acceptable behavior for their little boys (Kane 176). If emotional boys are handled disdainfully in general, then why would the marketers of HTC want to portray that in their ad, risking the disdain of consumers? It is perfectly acceptable for a woman to show emotion. “Tracing Gender’s Mark on Bodies, Sexualities, and Emotions” points out that “girls and women are encouraged to be ‘soft’; that is, emotionally in touch, vulnerable, and expressive” (“Tracing Gender’s Mark on Bodies, Sexualities, and Emotions” 281). Western women have been gendered to act this way in general. The sequence shows two opposite emotions being displayed by people. The laughter of the group of men may not be a particularly masculine display, but certainly the other way around would not have been acceptable. Of course, it seems that the masculine form of something is the neutral form unless otherwise specified. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir says “I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’… A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man” (de Beauvoir 2) This is important because the laughter could be seen as gender neutral, but as de Beauvoir points out, gender neutrality is masculine by default (de Beauvoir 2). The girl, on the other hand, is performing a specifically feminine emotion by crying.
While this particular commercial is full of examples that were not discussed in this analysis, those that were, were the strongest examples of gender stereotype reinforcement in the ad. Other examples, such as a lady pacing in a window while she worries over a mysterious male figure and girls giggling in a circle are also gender stereotype reinforcements, while others are gender neutral. Obviously, advertisements are geared toward audiences for a reason. The gender stereotypes played into in the scenes described in this analysis were chosen for a reason, meaning not only the marketers buy into these stereotypes, but their target audience does as well. While women are clearly no longer in the private sphere completely, they are still more closely associated with their families while men are more closely associated with working and earning money.
Works Cited
“...And Yet, People Hold On to Traditional Visions for Family Life.” Time.com. Time. 14 Oct. 2009. Web. 7 Nov. 2009.
de Beauvoir, Simone. “Introduction: Woman as Other.” The Second Sex.
Faludi, Susan. “Blame It on Feminism.” Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
Friedan, Betty. “The Problem that Has No Name.” The Feminine Mystique.
Kane, Emily W. “ ‘No Way My Boys Are Going to Like That!’ Parents’ Responses to Children’s Gender Nonconformity.” The Kaleidoscope of Gender. 173-80.
“Tracing Gender’s Mark on Bodies, Sexualities, and Emotions.” The Kaleidoscope of Gender. 277-82.
