Prepare for a lot of links, and quite possibly a lot of secondhand embarrassment.
The year is 1978. Women have had the right to vote in the US for over fifty years, but no permanent solution has yet come to eradicate the most menacing problem facing women since the dawn of humanity: That Not So Fresh Feeling. Luckily, Massengill was there to help. Massengill was a pioneer in the area of awkward advertising of feminine products. Their advertisements for douches (now widely regarded by the medical community to be dangerous for women's health) are downright cringe worthy, and introduce a common trope in women's advertising: discussing a product as if it's a normal part of a conversation. Take this commercial. Two women at work in their design studio discuss the hassle of douching as if this is an entirely normal conversation. Don't get me wrong: we definitely talk about stuff like this some time, but not at all in this fashion. The conversation is stilted and outlandish. Why, for instance, does one woman have a douche sitting on her desk at work? Turning a day-to-day conversation into a sales pitch simply doesn't work. Time after time, this trope comes off as entirely artificial and embarrassingly awkward.
Thirty years later, and not much has changed. The conversation-as-sales-pitch is still all too common (and all too awkward) in advertising targeting women. Like this commercial for birth control. This commercial starts out alright, but it quickly spirals downhill as one of the characters in the pitch bursts into a list of possible side effects of Yaz like its a normal topic in any conversation. This could only be a realistic portrayal of someone's nightmare: when you're out at the club and that friend of yours with PMDD and that other friend with a medical degree start geeking out way too hard about women's health, and you're left sitting there, wondering how much alcohol you'll need to consume to make this stuff seem interesting. Despite the graceless handling of the conversation in the ad and the downright disingenous way this trope plays out, it's still incredibly prevalent in advertisements targeted at women.
It's also interesting to note that neither the commercials for douching nor the Yaz commercial directly discuss the main issues they address. This might not be so surprising for the Massengill commercials (I'm pretty certain vaginal odors weren't a topic widely discussed on television in the 1970s), but the Yaz commercial comes from the late 2000s. It is called a 'birth control pill' and it is mentioned that it doesn't prevent HIV or STDs, but never once is its effectiveness for preventing pregnancy mentioned. You're not going to see a commercial where women are out at the club and say "Wow, I'm glad I'm on the Pill so I can get laid tonight and not worry about getting pregnant!" No, instead we hear about how effective these pills are at regulating menstruation or treating PMDD or acne. That's not to say women don't go on the Pill for those reasons, but it's called a birth control pill for a reason.
There are many, many more issues with advertising targeted at women, but these are two of the biggest offenders as far as I'm concerned: disingenuous, stilted set ups and a refusal to actually come out and say what the products are actually for. I could go on for pages about this (and I may very well do just that in the future), but in the meantime, I can only urge consumers to look critically at what's being advertised to them, and for advertisers to reassess the group that they're advertising to.
*I picked at this over a couple of days, so there's a bit of a date discrepancy.
Thirty years later, and not much has changed. The conversation-as-sales-pitch is still all too common (and all too awkward) in advertising targeting women. Like this commercial for birth control. This commercial starts out alright, but it quickly spirals downhill as one of the characters in the pitch bursts into a list of possible side effects of Yaz like its a normal topic in any conversation. This could only be a realistic portrayal of someone's nightmare: when you're out at the club and that friend of yours with PMDD and that other friend with a medical degree start geeking out way too hard about women's health, and you're left sitting there, wondering how much alcohol you'll need to consume to make this stuff seem interesting. Despite the graceless handling of the conversation in the ad and the downright disingenous way this trope plays out, it's still incredibly prevalent in advertisements targeted at women.
It's also interesting to note that neither the commercials for douching nor the Yaz commercial directly discuss the main issues they address. This might not be so surprising for the Massengill commercials (I'm pretty certain vaginal odors weren't a topic widely discussed on television in the 1970s), but the Yaz commercial comes from the late 2000s. It is called a 'birth control pill' and it is mentioned that it doesn't prevent HIV or STDs, but never once is its effectiveness for preventing pregnancy mentioned. You're not going to see a commercial where women are out at the club and say "Wow, I'm glad I'm on the Pill so I can get laid tonight and not worry about getting pregnant!" No, instead we hear about how effective these pills are at regulating menstruation or treating PMDD or acne. That's not to say women don't go on the Pill for those reasons, but it's called a birth control pill for a reason.
There are many, many more issues with advertising targeted at women, but these are two of the biggest offenders as far as I'm concerned: disingenuous, stilted set ups and a refusal to actually come out and say what the products are actually for. I could go on for pages about this (and I may very well do just that in the future), but in the meantime, I can only urge consumers to look critically at what's being advertised to them, and for advertisers to reassess the group that they're advertising to.
*I picked at this over a couple of days, so there's a bit of a date discrepancy.
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