Sunday, September 27, 2009

Creepy Ads Socializing Girls to Be Good Homemakers

I'm not going to lie to you: I love cooking and cleaning (with the exception of dusting, which I loathe). I don't think this is because I'm a chick, so much as because I'm a person who loves good food (and thus needed to be able to make it for myself or go broke buying it in restaurants) and because I'm fairly compulsive (and thus get a lot of pleasure from putting things in their place and making things perfect). I say this to make it clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with women cooking, cleaning, or being homemakers... but I do find it frustrating when products and advertising campaigns are produced that try to socialize girls to believe that this is a woman's job. This ad from the 1960's (hat-tip to Sociological Images) is particularly creepy:

I think my favorite part is that you're supposed to make sure you stay nice and pretty while you're doing all of this housework... Lest you think this is just a dated phenomenon, this modern ad is not all that different:

My favorite part of this one is definitely the fact that you can entertain your daughter's imagination by letting her do imaginary laundry. Awesome. I'm not going to offer any insightful feminist commentary here, (I have a football game to go watch, after all...) I just find these kinds of things fascinating and wanted to share.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know me, I was alive in the 60's. And I worked hard to give you a sense of equality! Sigh....some things don't change very much!

emmo said...

Yeah... The one from the 60's was creepy but not entirely surprising... The recent one was amazing to me... Sigh.

Run Lori Run said...

This takes me back to my women's studies days in college. Look at the Bratz dolls and the sexy halloween costumes for young girls... don't get me started! :)