A new regulation just went into effect in the U.K., banning advertisements that use gender stereotypes.
So no more ads depicting:
Men unable to change diapers; women cleaning while men kick their feet up on the couch; women having trouble with parking:
The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority said in a statement that it will also ban ads that connect physical features with success in the romantic or social spheres; assign stereotypical personality traits to boys and girls, such as bravery for boys and tenderness for girls; suggest that new mothers should prioritize their looks or home cleanliness over their emotional health; and mock men for being bad at stereotypically “feminine” tasks, such as vacuuming, washing clothes or parenting. (Source: NY Times)
The reasoning behind the ban is that gender stereotypes “can lead to unequal gender outcomes in public and private aspects of people’s lives.”
But the catalyst is said to be an ad for a weight-loss drink that showed a fetching young woman in a bikini and asked the question “Are you beach body ready?”
Over 70,000 folks signed a petition calling for this and other ads to be removed.
My thinking is that, if people felt the ads were sexist and offensive, why didn’t they just go after the company doing the advertising? Let them know you’re pissed, that you won’t buy their products. If they listen, great. If they don’t, well just don’t buy their products. And point out to the young folks in your life that the ads are sexist crap.
Personally, I don’t find beach-body-ready types of ads offensive because they’re sexist. I find them offensive when they overstate the benefits of using a product, which I’m guessing happens more often than not. And which – when it gets into outright-lie territory - ought to be regulated.
Other than ridding the airwaves of such outright lies, or pornographic content, and forbidding ads that condone/promote hate speech and violence, I’m not all that big a fan of banning advertisements.
Although they were some of the best ads on TV – the Marlboro Man riding around Marlboro Country to the theme from “The Magnificent Seven,” the catchy tune used in the Benson & Hedges ad “Oh the disadvantages…” – I’m just as glad that those ads are gone. Smoking serves no purpose other than to get people sick and killed.
But should they have been banned?
Did banning cigarette advertising help reduce smoking, or did smoking rates decline because people took the Surgeon General’s Report seriously? Because people woke up to the fact that ‘cancer sticks’ really were ‘cancer sticks.” Because a skull & crossbones warning on a cigarette package gave some smokers pause. Because government and public service programs aimed at stopping kids from smoking actually worked.
Curiously, drinking alcohol also kills people, but beer, wine and hard alcohol ads – often accompanied by “drive responsibly” messaging are allowed.
Go figure.
Then there are the ads for toys and other products aimed at kids.
B&W TV Saturday when I was growing up was a wasteland of bad children’s programming.
Forget anything as elevated as Sesame Street. We had Howdy Doody. And crappy half-hour quasi-Westerns like Fury, My Friend Flicka and Sky King. Interspersed within and between these gems were toy ads.
Every boy wants a Remco, toy. And so do girls.
Here it comes, here it comes, greatest toy you’ve ever seen, and its name is Mr. Machine.
You can tell it’s Mattel, it’s swell.
(Of course, our version of this latter on was “You tell it’s Mattel by its smell.”)
In any case, kids glued to the TV on those 1950’s Saturdays were inundated with ads for toys. And for sugary cereals (“I’m hungry, I’m hungry, for good things to eat. For Sugar Jets, Sugar Jets, candied and sweet.”) For sugary drinks like Kool-and Hawaiian Punch. For candy (“Charlie says, ‘love that Good ‘n Plenty”, and my own personal favorite: “Bit O’Honey goes a long, long way. If I had one head, it would last all day.” Of course, the reason why Bit O’Honey lasted all day was because it was practically inedible.)
I don’t know whether, in the US, ads aimed at the kiddos are regulated. I do know that there’s a fair amount of talk about it, especially w.r.t food marketing, given the rate of childhood obesity. So maybe ads aimed at the little ones should be banned. That or parents could develop the deaf ears that parents had back in the day when it mattered not how often you pestered your folks for Kool-Aid or a Mr. Machine. You weren’t going to get the object of your desire unless your parents wanted you to have it. Which was never the case.
In any case, I don’t spend a whole lot of time analyzing ads.
I do spend a bit of time making fun of them. Especially the pharma ads of the ‘don’t talk Taltz if you are allergic to Taltz” variety.
But I will observe that ads are less sexist than they used to be. That they’re less violent. (I can’t imagine that any toy company is running ads for a plastic Tommy gun.) That the people represented in them are more diverse than back in the day when everyone was a blonde, and the only persons of color were the Chinese laundry couple in the Calgon ad.
Ads are still, and likely always will be, annoying. But when there are ads that are truly repugnant (and sometimes just because some group chose to take offense to something fairly innocuous), I’m going to trust “the market” to pressuring a company to withdraw them. Do the Brits really need a big old set of new regulations here?
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