Selling like a girl: how advertising has hijacked gender equality
Don’t say “sorry”. Think you are beautiful. Lean in. None of this is helping.
The latest advert for Always features a procession of young adults at a casting, each in turn asked to do something “like a girl”.
Running. Throwing. Fighting. All, even the women, do the activities badly, half-heartedly, without passion or commitment. Young girls, pre-puberty, are then asked to do the same things: they perform them with gusto, fighting hard, running as fast as they can. “When,” the advert asks, “did doing something ‘like a girl’ become an insult?”
“Like A Girl” is only the most recent example of what might be called femi-selling: the use, appropriation or exploitation of feminist principles and gender-equal ideas to sell products. Another current example is Pantene’s “Not Sorry”, suggesting women stop apologising all the time, and, further back, their “Labels Against Women”, contrasting the words used to describe men and women (Boss/Bossy, Persuasive/Pushy), and before that Dove’s “Onslaught”, suggesting mothers should “talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does”.
Dove were the first to use this angle, all the way back in 2004, with their Campaign for Real Beauty, showing a variety of “real” women in underwear. Even then, it was obvious there was an element, but only an element, of subversion — after all, the undressed bodies of women were still on display, normalising female nudity in the service of selling. But because it was subverting the advertising norm, it was allowed to pass.
Mollie Hemingway, writing at The Federalist, makes this argument about a more recent Pantene advert, pointing out that the company is both introducing and reinforcing stereotypes: “Is it really so valiant for Pantene to use powerful stereotyping imagery so the company can do nothing more than profit off those stereotypes by courageously standing against things we all stand against?”
It is, of course, easy to be cynical. These companies are selling, not performing a public service. Always, rather obviously, has a strong reason to want to “empower” girls during puberty, because that is precisely the point at which their products will be needed by girls — and once they start to use that brand, they will likely stick with it.
But there’s a deeper reason why these adverts are unhelpful. Not only do they not solve the problems they identify, they actually make the situation for women worse. Here’s why.
Adverts have interpreted the world. The point is to change it
In many ways, femi-selling is a natural capitalist progression — take an unfair societal pressure and sell a solution to it — but goes one step further, by appropriating the problem without offering any real solution. One might argue that big corporations — Dove is owned by Unilever; both Pantene and Always by Proctor&Gamble — don’t get to make such a criticism because they swim in the same swamp of exploitation. But my criticism of these adverts is more fundamental.
Even if companies genuinely identify the problem, they cannot provide a solution to it. For a very obvious reason: companies can only sell to individuals, not to a society. And the problem is a societal one, not an individual one.
Look at the gender inequality problems these adverts highlight and seek to solve and they are all about language, about words — whether those are words that women use on themselves (“I’m not beautiful”), words they use on others (“Sorry”) or words others use to them (“Like a girl”, “Vain”)
There’s an important reason for that. Words are individual and individuals can change them. It’s a suggestion of empowerment, where that empowerment is only individual, not societal. Yes, there is a value in recognising labels and self-talk, but it is all self-improvement. It does nothing to change the wider culture.
A woman no longer saying “sorry” does not remove the expectation that women should adopt an apologetic stance — and does not mean that women will not be judged for no longer saying “sorry”. (Read this from Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker on the dangers for women who negotiate.) Recognising the labels and the double-standards is helpful as a start, but if other people around you continue to use and believe those labels, their power is little diminished.
Knowing your body image is warped does not particularly help you fix it — nor does it do anything to alleviate the myriad public pressures to “fix” your body. Talking to your daughter about the beauty industry does nothing to stop that barrage of adverts coming. Her understanding of the situation may be somewhat improved, but the saturation of images of unrealistic female bodies in the media, advertising, fashion, film, music and daily life continues to take its corrosive toll.
Even if the internal dialogue has changed for some women, the outside world has not.
(Although not writing about this topic, the American feminist Soraya Chemaly makes a related point, that the approach taken by these adverts makes “girls…responsible for the world’s responses to them”. The world doesn’t have to change, but women do.)
It takes a village to raise a gender
How much is this a problem? In one sense, of course, it isn’t. There are many feminisms and this version of individual empowerment through purchasing is still a reasonable, if narrow, achievement. Small drops in the ocean and all that.
But there is a real chance that a feminist worldview gets crowded out by individual elements and arguments that already fit a broader social paradigm.
What passes for feminism in public discourse — and therefore in the hierarchy of issues that public policy focuses on — is already rather narrow, a mix of easily digestible chunks around fat, fashion, fitness and family.
It all slots rather easily into the newspaper columns and political soundbites and corporate seminars that pass for public discussion and organised policy.
Take, for example, the idea of “having it all”. It is easier to discuss endlessly whether women can have it all and how they can have it all (just lean in) than it is to ask a more difficult question:
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that women can have both a working life and a family life?
The answer to that question is always individual — it is the responsibility of the woman. She chose to have a child. She chose to have a career. (Leave aside that having a career is the best way to earn enough to provide for that child.)
But what if the answer were different? What if the answer were: society?
Because then the responsibility would be shared. It would be up to governments to ensure there was sufficient affordable childcare. It would be up to companies to ensure that working hours did not penalise parents and that hiring committees did not discriminate.
You don’t have to believe that government is the answer to everything to believe that society has a role in achieving certain social goods.
We do offer that answer in other contexts. “Whose responsibility is it to ensure that children have a decent education?” The answer to that isn’t solely the parents. There are committees that decide and review what is taught. National standards on teaching, on how to teach, on who can teach, on what educational qualifications are needed to teach. There are laws disallowing children from working and legislating how long they must stay in school. There is national testing. In some countries, there are free school meals. There is coordination and input from business. Social services are involved in truancy, as are the police.
In other words, as a society, the answer to the question “Whose responsibility is it to ensure that children have a decent education?” has a much broader answer than just one person.
Of course there is an individual and family component to educating a child, as there is to pursuing a career and raising a family. There are choices and the consequences of choices. But, as a society, we tend to believe that ensuring children have a decent education is a sufficiently important social good that resources are directed towards that end. Even on a purely economic argument, that makes sense: better to educate as many children as possible so that they can enter the workforce and be productive.
Yet that argument applies precisely to women in the workplace. Again, on a purely economic argument, it makes sense to direct group resources towards ensuring that as many people as possible contribute to the economy. Factor in that many of those women will be highly educated — in many countries at the cost of the taxpayer through subsidised education — and the argument for not having under-used “resources” becomes obvious.
To lay all these questions at the feet of advertisers is excessive. Businesses will use whichever levers work. Yet it is worth recognising the implicit assumptions informing the messages.
To ignore that there is a wider context of gender inequality which holds women back from achieving their full potential is to do them a serious disservice. Words matter, but they are understood in a context. Actions matter, but they bring reactions.
Nor is it sufficient to put the onus of fixing the ills of society on to individuals. Advertisers may be giving equality a little push, but they are not the only ones who need to be doing the pushing.
We cannot keep saying that if women just lean in and stop saying sorry and start thinking they are beautiful that the strictures of gender inequality will vanish, washed away like so much soap and shampoo.
Follow @FaisalAlYafai for more journalism and commentary. Or find out Why feminists did not support an athlete’s right to strip naked, or How to write at a time of revolution
(These thoughts, rather naturally, reflect only my opinion, not that of any organisations or institutions I am affiliated with.)
