GRSJ 224 Femvertising

Introduction

Feminism is among the controversial social concepts in modern society. A portion of the population believes that it is a political body that mainly focuses on female issues. To these people feminism is about women dominating a mans world, however, this is not the basis of this ideology. Famous feminists, including Betty Friedan, Gloria Anzaldua, and Heidi Hartmann among many others have dispelled these notions by focusing on gender norms and roles, as well as gendered social practices in regards to feminism. While many people have different opinions on the multiple ideals of this concept, feminism has stribed to be a inclusive concept. The concept centers on the organization of families, careers, and the public-political life that is gender inclusive (Ampofo, Adjei, & Brobbey, 2015). .In recent years feminism is changing ways how ads work, right? For example, some ads look very empowering, or some ads hijacked feminist ideas to sell their products, or how some female CEOs are claiming we don't need feminism now, there is already gender equality.In recent years the feminism movement has rapidly grown and gained substamtial pace throughout the world. Not only has it gained the attention of government law makers but also of corporate business men. The use of feminism in corporate ads and the exploitation of the movement to gain popularity has slowly started to become an issue. This “is the contemporary trend of femvertising, where seemingly pro-women sentiments are used to sell products” (Hoad-Reddick, 2017). One of the most popular examples of this is “pinkwashing”, this is “the promotion of consumer goods and services using the pink ribbon that represents support for breast cancer-related charities” (Wikipedia, 2018), this is also used with the rainbow flag to promote friendliness towards the LGBTQ.

Femvertising

While many ads have been applauded for their use of images that promotes women’s empowerment. People are starting to look at if these campaigns are contributing to the movements or if they are just increasing their own company’s sales. (Drake, 2017). The biggest thing that stands out is coorperations are using women still as a object, at first it was all about sexualizing the women to sell a product.  “Women were presented in an inferior manner…” (Grau & Zotos, 2016), whereas now they are presented as strong capable and even a dominating gender in some cases. Femvertising is becoming more about the financial gain rather than about spreading awareness and fighting for female rights. Society has made it acceptable for companies to ride the feminism train for profits.

Why it’s setting us back?

Many of these companies that are branding themselves as all inclusive and allies to feminism are setting the whole movement back (Curtis, 2018). The back lash from these campaigns comes from the fact that these campaigns are exploitation the feminist movement for personal gain. Dove soap is one of the more popular examples used, the campaign that address feminist issues had 30% more exposure than any other media space they had or ad they ran before. “Dove grew from 2.5 billion to 4 billion in the decade after the campaign launched” (Curtis, 2018), this is only one of the hundreds of examples of companies feeding off feminism. The issue with this is we’ve gone from the exploitation of women to now exploiting the fight against women that a lot of these corporate companies aided to create. An example of this being Gillette, a lot of their commercials talk about how with a clean shave youll get a kiss from a girl or you’ll attract women, they use the idea of women as a sexual prize for a clean shave. However, in the past month they came out with a commercial breaking down these barriers and addressing their issues, one of the most controversial parts were that they were addressing hegemonic masculinity but they slipped in the mention of the #metoo movement which is primarily about women, this raised concern for ulterior motives by the company. it’s upsetting that no one will know if their motives were to truly help the movement or just increase overall sales.

Conclusion

To conclude, the overall backlash that has come from feminist communites on these corporate companies are negative. However the main issue is knowing whether a company has good intentions or not. From an online study down they found "that Femvertising has a positive impact on ad and brand opinions, purchase intentions, and emotional connection to brands" (Curtis, 2018), now notice how this doesn't talk about the exposure of the movement or the direct impact it. The only measurable gains are if the companies sales are increasing or not. A lot of the ads too are hypocritical because they will use femvertising as a way to campaign for their company and yet they will still promote unrealistic beauty standards or the sexual fantasies that revolve around their product, it's almost as if they always have one foot in the door and one foot out.

Work Cited

Ampofo, A. A., Adjei, E. A., & Brobbey, M. K. (2015). Feminisms and Acculturation around the Globe. International

Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 905-911.

Curtis, C. (2018, December 20). 'Femvertising' does nothing for feminism. Retrieved from

https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2018/12/19/femvertising-does-nothing-for-feminism/

Drake, V. E. (2017, November 3). The Impact of Female Empowerment in Advertising

(Femvertising). Retrieved fromhttps://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d3ce/e9ec10baf89ac

4890407ee6b4bb5aa602768.pdf

Gillette. (2019, January 13). Retrieved March 09, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=koPmuEyP3a0

Grau, S. L., & Zotos, Y. C. (n.d.). Gender stereotypes in advertising: A review of current

research. Retrieved fromhttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02650487.

2016.1203556?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Hoad-Reddick, Kate, "Pitching the Feminist Voice: A Critique of Contemporary Consumer

Feminism" (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 5093.

Martell, K., & Martell, K. (2017, December 05). The Problem With Femvertising (The #1

Marketing Trend to Leave Behind in 2018). Retrieved from

https://medium.com/@katiemartell/the-problem-with-femvertising-the-1-marketing-

trend-to-leave-behind-in-2018-aec778585564

Pinkwashing. (2018, October 31). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkwashing