Society's Misguided Perspective of Home
Rachel Niemi
In this blog post I will discuss the social construction of gender in the home and how these stereotypes are portrayed in the media and in advertisements. I decided to focus on the perspective of mainstream America and how the home has attempted to promote and perpetuate these misguided perspectives. The following pictures display these stereotypes at their finest.
After observing all of these pictures and many more I found online, it is obvious that women, her home, and her "femininity" all go hand and hand with each other. Although some of the ads I found are from a few decades ago, we can still see these gender stereotypes integrated in our lives today. The home is almost an extension of the woman, she cleans it, takes care of it, and makes sure everyone else in the home is taken care of as well.
The first picture above, is the perfect image to define the separation of spheres which is discussed in the article "Putting Women in Place". The image is from a popular hit TV show called Mad Men. One half of the image shows the men on the show in the working sphere and and the other half shows all the women in the show carrying on their live in the home sphere. These two spheres separate the masculine world of work from the feminine world of family and home. I put the last picture in there as something to display the opposite, an image showing the man doing the housework, while the woman is in the background holding a suitcase.
The product I created for my public education campaign is called "The Manly Vac". It's advertised specifically for men based on not only it's name, but it's power, size, and how it is being used by the man in the ad. My inspiration for my public education campaign came from a Dr. Pepper advertisement that says "It's so bold. It's not for women." That advertisement has always rubbed me the wrong way. Who says a woman can't be bold? Why is the advertisement telling me this product is not for me based solely on my gender? I wanted to turn the idea around so that I was advertising a product to men that gender stereotypes would normally disagree with. The other important thing to notice is that a man is using a "feminine" product (because society says women are supposed to do all the cleaning) in a "masculine" way. This was my way of showing that the only way you can convince men who believe in these stereotypes is to transform the product in something that's "manly". Just like The Manly Vac.
