New Insights into Gendered Discursive Practices - Language, Gender and Identity Construction

These historical accounts in diverse countries are useful in order to maintain a global perspective on women’s rights movements, which until recently have not been considered as part of “human rights”. In books and videos, Charlotte Bunch (1990) has addressed the question of human rights from a feminist perspective. So far, women have taken leading roles in redefining social concepts, but a territory to be conquered yet is the redefinition of global policy issues, for which women should have at least a 51% right to address.

4 Unofficial propaganda. Targeting individuals’ life-styles

As Klein (1999: 15-28) has pointed out in No Logo , marketing, consumerism and especially branding go hand in hand in targeting certain groups of individuals for marketing campaigns. Klein charts the transition from advertising a product to advertising a brand , thus blending consumerism and marketing. She discusses the lifestyle image in relation to brand names of such companies as Nike, Apple, the Body Shop, Calvin Klein, Disney, Levi’s and Starbucks. A case in point, broadcast on Spanish television advertising, is the brand marketing of Ikea –“Bienvenido a la rep ública independiente de tu casa” [Welcome to the independent republic of your home.]– advertising which combines the idea of home and family, as the most important aspects of Spanish life. That is, the brand becomes an experience, a lifestyle.

One of the most disturbing tendencies in recent marketing-branding campaigns is the linking of femininity to sexiness. This type of commercial targeting for young girls begins at a very early age. To understand how marketing tendencies for young girls have changed, one can compare the differences between marketing strategies for Barbie dolls in the 1970s to strategies for the present-day marketing of the Bratz dolls. As Walters (2010: 4), has noticed, although Barbie dolls had unusually large breasts and impossibly tiny waists, the dolls were marketed with diverse professional careers, such as an astronaut, a pilot or a doctor. In contrast, the Bratz dolls are marketed with a wardrobe for clubbing and shopping. Their attire includes fishnet stockings, miniskirts, see-through blouses, and crop tops (showing midriff). That is to say, Barbies were marketed as sexually attractive AND intelligent. Now, in the Bratz dolls, intelligence has been dismissed as an attractive attribute for girls to acquire in favor of sexual allure as the outstanding must-have attribute.

Given that all this hyper-sexuality marketing can be seen as a kind of “grooming” of young girls for future careers as models, starlets or even as pole dancers, instead of preparing them for professional careers, it seems to support the return of a more traditional conception of women’s sexual attributes as biologically rather than socially constructed. Unfortunately, these marketing trends tend to be supported by national press, both in the U.S. and in the UK. Every so often, the popular press print stories, based on supposed experiments that show, for example, that girls prefer the colour pink, while boys prefer blue, as written up in a serious newspaper, The Guardian (Wainwright 2007), in an article “Pink for a girl and blue for a boy –it’s all down to evolution” (as cited in Walter 2010: 11). A recent article in the UK Daily Mirror (4 thof Dec., 2013: 8), entitled “Women wired for success… but men best at throwing”, comments on men and women are divided into categorizations such as “intelligence”, “throwing”, “driving”, “sleeping”, “doctors”, “boozing”, “being boss” and “multi-tasking”. Apart from listing no author, the article cites only one study (“Canadian research published in October”, no authors or publications listed), as far as how Canadian doctors follow guidelines; the rest seems to be all conjecture. There is no mention of whether these “traits” are prevalent only in Western societies, and of course, there is no mention of the fact that these characteristics may be socially learned, and, therefore have nothing to do with “biological” differences. The tale tell evidence for the levity of the information reported is that accompanying the article is a large picture of a pink bikini-clad woman whose backside shows her apparently trying to throw a beach ball.

Many of these types of reports come from “experiments” carried out by researchers involved in sociobiology, following the founder of this academic field, Edward O. Wilson. In his book (1979: 129), On Human Nature , he states that “the evidence for a genetic difference in behaviour is varied and substantial. In general, girls are predisposed to be more intimately sociable and less physically venturesome.”

As can be noted, theories of genetically conditioned personal attributes have been with us since the early 1970s and, over the decades, such theories have come and gone. But what we have been witnessing recently is that the lifestyle branding is increasingly becoming connected with a biological determinism. That is, the idea of real sex differences is becoming more and more entrenched in marketing tendencies. According to Walter (2010: 79), this means that there has arisen a confusion between sexual liberation and the sexual objectification of young girls. We know that young girls are subject to a certain kind of bullying through internet avenues, but the connection with marketing tendencies should also be pointed out. Walters documents the disproportionate impact that sexy female heroines display in many video games, in the Bratz dolls or in the W.I.T.C.H. girls for marketing to young females. Marketing also capitalizes on providing adult styles for very young girls – fashions which adult women wear: bikinis, crop tops, tangas, etc.

It seems that female lifestyles are increasingly becoming more limited to a narrow characterization of the female as “sexual”. To be noted also is the increase in clubs, especially in the UK, dedicated to lap-dancing, pole-dancing, etc., so much so that entire neighbourhoods have protested against their locating within neighbourhood districts. The marketing of the sexiness of women (also of men) points to a narrowing of “lifestyles” for both women and men.

It is necessary to realize that marketing and branding are artificial constructs, in no way related to real life, or even to be sought after. By moving away from this biological determinism, we can allow more freedom to people as people, whatever their sexual inclination.

5 Conclusion

Through official and unofficial propaganda, this article has demonstrated the various ways in which entire populations and specific social groups, notably women, have been targeted as the focus of public messages. If a more modern conception of propaganda is taken to mean an enhancement of the public’s perception of the institution(s) so as to persuade the public to behave in the appropriate manner, then propaganda begins to look very much like commercial advertising, or even social change advertising, based, as they all are, on perception of the public’s feelings and desires. When propaganda and advertising are studied in depth, the use of the same techniques becomes more readily discernible. Fear seems to be the predominant factor in convincing groups and individuals that they should “go with the flow”, or follow the lead of others.

The combination of branding and sexist advertising has brought to the fore types of dress, dancing and attitudes in girls and young women that have changed their orientations towards the lifestyles to be emulated. Such hypersexual advertising also affects what young men learn to expect in young women. These orientations clearly do not represent more freedom for women to choose but rather a narrowing of what being a “real woman” means. Regarding this restriction of social perspectives, more research should be carried out on the effect of pornography on youngsters’ concepts of sexuality and sharing in a sexual relationship. As well, the connection between propaganda/advertising and sexual, racial or socioeconomic targeting of specific groups merits more attention.