Gender Advertising

Abstract

First paragraph: Gender and advertising focuses on the way in which women, and more recently men, are represented in paid-for commercial messages designed to encourage consumers to purchase the product being promoted. In the Anglo-American world, the topic has been viewed as important in respect of morality since the end of the nineteenth century, when some advertisers were accused of using images of scantily clad women to sell unrelated products. From the 1960s, an additional concern was the way in which restricting the image of women in advertising to that of sex object or housewife limited the aspirations of women by presenting them with a limited range of roles with which to identify. More recently, concerns over the representation of women have been joined by concerns over the representation of men.