Women in Advertising...

From the dawn of advertising, women and men have been portrayed in different lights. I thought I would have a look at a few adverts to see how they have changed over time looking at women and Cars and the social stereotypes presented.

The first advert I saw was for the Mini Automatic back in the 1970s. This is a perfect example of a sexist advert against women denoting the woman driving the car is pretty simple and even she would be able to drive it! Back in the 70s, political correctness was not as much of an issue as it is today; Women should have been cleaning the home and men should have been polishing their cars & this was very much reflected in advertising of all types.

Nowadays women are proving that they are actually more than happy to spend more on such luxury items as cars than men would, with one study showing women making up two thirds of the ownerships in the US of expensive cars.

Looking at advertisements today, women are used as more of a sexual object, a selling tactic for the car sales. You will rarely find an advert that will push sexism the other way and poke fun at the male species, but..... BMW did recently feature two sets of adverts featuring a man and a woman that were printed in different magazines, probably a woman’s magazine for the first and a men’s magazine for the second. The very sexulaised advert shows an image of a woman and a man being intimate and the woman is objectifying and dominating the man with the man’s face covered by an image of a car. The advert actually proves that it is less about who is in charge and more about the product you are trying to sell. The car image does not change from advert to advert therefore the goal remains the same- to sell the car, just to different target audiences.

Maybe this is how it has always been subconsciously, we just haven’t wanted to see it? The woman in the Mini could actually be seen as quite empowering to other women at this stage in time. After all, how many women (if they are supposed to be sitting pretty at home) could even contemplate owning a car like this? The Mini and the BMW are both lovely cars to own and are a lot of the time a car many will aspire to own- I would certainly feel very proud sitting behind the wheel of a BMW Sport!