Girls Won’t Be Boys

By KNIGHT, Kim

It’s the season for peace, love and sexist advertising. KIM KNIGHT reports. THIS CHRISTMAS, boys will unwrap trucks and girls will unwrap dolls. Mum will bake a cake, dad will carve a roast, God will be a man and all will be right with the world.

It’s the season of peace, love and gender stereotypes. But for some women, it’s the thin end of a year-round wedge. Advertising mailers showing boys shooting hoops and girls pushing prams are more noticeable now, they say, because there are more ads at Christmas. We aren’t seeing an increase in sexist advertising – because we never saw a decrease.

“There’s always been sexism and there’s definitely been objectification of women since advertising has been widely available,” says Camilla Belich, co-president of the New Zealand University Students Association. “But I think at the moment, there’s a really dangerous assumption that sexism isn’t as prevalent or doesn’t exist in the same way.”

Turn on the television and watch in wonder as the teenage boy whose mother fed him Nutrigrain lifts the couch so she can vacuum underneath. Buy a packet of Pascall marshmallows and check out the fun and easy recipes for “kids and Mums to make”. Walk past the optometrist. Maybe you need glasses to notice the model on the poster is wearing only a bra?

If you’re a man, you can spend your Telecom three-minute hour explaining why you’re in a spa pool surrounded by bikini-clad models. If you’re a woman, you can phone your dad and explain why you’ve parked the car so badly. Does the baby need changing? Call mum – because according to the Huggies nappies campaign, dad will be busy washing the family wagon.

“Things that were contentious when everyone was at a mutual consensus that there was sexism, are somehow a little bit more accepted,” Belich says.

Last year, she was part of the tertiary women’s focus group that helped shut down a Dunedin pub’s “wifebeater Wednesday” (buy $10 worth of liquor, get the free white singlet colloquially known as a wifebeater). The same group took on a Tui beer billboard that read, “That bikini’s too small – yeah right”. The response was a new sign: “No one minds dumb, sexist beer ads – yeah right”.

What about Tui’s tongue-in- cheek claim that men look good in speedos?

“I don’t think the way to create a perfect world would be to start objectifying men or making them feel awkward about their bodies. That’s just as bad,” Belich says.

In July, L Wilkin and others agreed. They wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority about a Kimberleys Fashion advertisement featuring a naked male cyclist, a young woman holding a shopping bag and the quote, “Now that I’ve shopped, it’s time for something mindless.”

The complainant said the ad caused offence on the grounds of gender, “by suggesting that men are mindless, or are a mindless activity, and that shopping requires more thought than dealing with men”.

ASA executive director Hilary Souter said the authority dealt with an average of 30 complaints a year about sexist advertising. Last year it received a total of 777 complaints.

“For me it comes down to context, audience, medium, product. I think that in general some people want to give their products a sexier image… if they’re targeting it to an audience who don’t have a problem with that sort of approach, then we generally don’t get complaints.

“If they use a very public medium, like billboards, newspapers or prime-time viewing on television, then there is much more likely to be a reaction.”

Souter says that in general, “advertisers aren’t going out there to offend potential customers”. But as more skincare products become available, as clothing gets skimpier and the quest for the body beautiful continues, she says there is an acceptance advertising will get sexier.

“Boundaries do move, but they move forward and backwards.”

Sex sells. But sexism shouldn’t.

To Focus C2 From Focus C1

In the 1970s, women’s groups rallied against sexist advertising. The feminist magazine Broadsheet had a page called Hogwash that featured New Zealand’s worst print examples:

* November 1975: a girl smiles at her dentist and says, “he says my teeth are so good, I can be his receptionist when I grow up”.

* September 1976: the Chef’s Takeaways asks, “Wife a bad cook? Eat out with us and keep her as a pet!”

* October 1977: a company looking for a bookkeeper advertises for a woman – or person.

* March 1978: Thai Airways tells its customers, “the only wide bodies we have in service are our DC10s”.

And, in September of that same year, Wellington company Colenso says it is looking for a “foxy lady… who doesn’t mind being hounded by 3 jolly good sports… we’ll really make it worth your while being caught”.

In January 1977, to Topaz cigarettes said freedom was “making it in a man’s world”.

Long-time feminist Sandra Coney says advertisers started cleaning up their acts in the 1970s.

“And I think that flowed through to the 80s. These issues were seriously discussed and it was in the context of a social movement to improve the status of women.”

So, imagine her dismay a fortnight ago, when she heard Auckland Regional Transport Authority’s radio advertisement about its mascot bussing in to town to check out “some nice birds”.

She belatedly realised the mascot was a pukeko, but says that doesn’t excuse the ad.

“I just thought, oh my God, how tired and 70s and sexist and surely we can do better than that.”

Coney says what astonished her most was the response from the ad’s supporters, “as if I’d turned the clock back 30 years… feminists were blue-stockinged, humourless, man-hating, da de dah”.

Coney says there does seem to be a new attitude that “we can be as sexist as we like and it’s not sexist somehow.

“But I don’t see somehow we’re living in this equal nirvana and we’ve got it sussed so much that we can somehow have sexist behaviour or advertising and it doesn’t matter.”

Get a sense of humour, say the critics.

The Students Association’s national women’s rights officer, Karen Price, is unsure why women are prepared to accept borderline behaviour. “Perhaps it’s just this wanting to fit in and not feel like the enemy all the time.”

She says advertisements that promote gender stereotyping “train young girls to focus on their appearance and to judge themselves and whether they fit in or not, according to how they look and how they dress. Which has flow-on effects for their whole life”.

What’s wrong with a commercial that encourages mothers to grow teenage iron men?

“Girls eat Nutrigrain as well,” Price says. “long-term I think we are continuing to reinforce one gender as weaker or inferior to the other, which is nonsensical and unfair. And we’ll continue to see women painted in one sphere and light and judged according to her physical ability.”

For one major retailer, The Warehouse, it’s a simple matter of appealing to the audience most likely to be interested in a product, says spokeswoman Cynthia Church, and “we tailor our marketing accordingly”.

“So it’s natural that yes, we do have men in ads for automotive products. Unless it’s Father’s Day, we typically don’t find women in the automotive department.”

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Camilla Belich, left, and Karen Price of the NZ Students Union Association say sexist advertising is beyond a joke.