In the advertisements of clothing, food, and household appliances, the females are depicted as housewives; they are doing their housework, cooking in the kitchen,presented as caregivers of the family.
In the advertisements of clothing, food, and household appliances, the females are depicted as housewives; they are doing their housework, cooking in the kitchen,presented as caregivers of the family. Usually, in this kind of advertisement is to show the womanhood and femininity of females. The female is cooking or washing in the kitchen, while her husband and her kids watching TV in the living room, as it can be shown in the following advertisements.
As it shows in Figure 1, the slogan of the advertisement is “Please...let your wife come into the living room,” in the advertisement, the women is washing dishes in the kitchen, while her husband and kids are watching TV in the living room11 What they concluded is the general characteristics of the stereotypical female images in advertising, usually, female images depicted in advertising often with perfect body shape (tall, long legged, narrow hipped); they are young, fashion,romantic and beautiful. They appear in cosmetics, clothing, cigarette and beer advertisements. In these advertisements, the female’s body has been deprived of independent personality, and their bodies are dismembered as faces, legs, breast,and hair. From the perspective of gender theory, the female images in advertisements are placed at the level of “to be looked and appreciated”, they are lived under the male discourse, all of this they are doing is to cater theaesthetic of man, the images presented in advertisements are shaped by the society and social culture.
With the enormous and tremendous development of advertisement, the function of advertisement is not just delivering the information of product, it is also a mirror to reflect the real society, and its creation is often to cater the public’s aesthetic taste. So that females are the most frequently used models in it, in the advertisement females are often depicted as good wife and devoted mother, this kind of image is often appear in the household or the food and drug advertisements, and the plot of the advertisement is often like this: A mother is cooking in the kitchen, and her husband is seems to say that she is doomed to do house chores.
Except for the housewives presented in the advertisements, females in advertisements are often depicted inferior to men. As it shows in Figure 4 is tie advertisement and Figure 5 is a man’s slacks advertisement, both of them are for man’s products, but women are presented in the advertisements, in a subordinate way. In the tie advertisement, its slogan is “Show her it’s a man’s world,”
a man sitting on the bed, and a women kneeling on the ground, with breakfast in her hands, it is to show the quality of the tie, but it implies that man is superior than woman, and woman should serve for man. For the slacks advertisement, the women in it is even under the man’s foot, and the content of the advertisement is like this:
Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn’t have to fire a shot to floor her. After one look at his Mr. Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk all over her. That noble styling sure soothes the savage heart! If you’d like your own doll-to-doll carpeting, hunt up a pair of these he-man Mr. Leggs slacks. The woman in the advertisement is even under the man’s foot, which has shown the woman’s status obviously.
From the above three advertisements, it can be concluded that the females in theadvertisements are often in the roles as housewives, doing house chores at home, or as product users, in the advertisements, they also appeared inferior to man. From the perspective of gender theory, this is unequal for women, the images of women
presented in the advertisements are in accordance with the male dominated society, it has been shaped by the society and culture, female’s image appeared in the advertisement is under the male discourse, they presented as men expected