The Points Feasey Makes
Writing from the perspective of the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University and much enthused about the representation of gender in popular television, Feasey (357) remarks in early 2008 about advertising for male grooming products in the UK and how a product like Unilever’s Lynx apparently flew off store shelves in response. In particular, the author wonders how the Lynx campaigns pander to existing stereotypes of masculinity or construct new ones that are “gender fair”.
To the author, all commerce and advertising around fashion, fragrances and cosmetics are about exploiting gender as a social resource. Hence, her interest lies in seeing how such original advertising fare “…negotiate the power, mastery and authority of the hegemonic male” (357). And since advertising for the brand also airs under the Axe name in the United States, Feasey is concerned that a trans-Atlantic reshaping of gender roles may take place.
At core, the author protests that Anglo-American culture, as circumscribed by movies and advertising, is much too focused on young, slender-muscled, mainstream White, assertively competitive, clean-shaven, and heterosexual men. She shares the feminist bias that to be a man on these terms is to be strongly anti-feminine, to marginalize colored minorities, the old and the outright homosexual. If feminine stereotypes in movies, television and advertising can be questioned, why not the ideal of masculinity that is being held up?
Feasey critiques British advertising, among the most creative in the world, for creating selective imagery, for ideological fantasy, for letting male actors and voice-overs dominate advertising executions two decades after the feminist movement had made their protests known, for showing the male as succeeding in the public sphere while confining women to homemaker roles, for hardly ever depicting men in child-nurturing or housecleaning roles, for refusing to show that men can be content staying at home.
Happily, men became more comfortable with ideas of good grooming. To her credit, the author concedes that Lynx advertising is not purely predatory (“Hat Stand”, “Kitchen” and “Horse Riders”) since many more executions show plainer-looking Joe’s surprised at how a whiff of Lynx attracts women to them.
Assessment
Considering how affordable the Lynx line is, Feasey hits the nail right on the head when she presumes that young men (“post-pubescent”) experiencing the angst of shaky self-esteem comprise the primary target audience for the brand. Humor, she believes, is a way for youthful males to compensate for their “unseemly” interest in good grooming.
In any case, the author gets it exactly right when she observes that Lynx ads equate the product with attracting women, just as women’s cosmetics have catered to the inherent need for social acceptance, love and marriage in earlier periods. To their credit, she opines, Unilever and their ad agency depict the mainstream male rather than the aggressively “thrusting”, well-built and good-looking Ben Affleck’s of this world. In the end, she cannot help but express the sneaking suspicion that Lynx plays up the image of a pliant, everyday male only to give men the permission to maintain a “hegemonic” hold on women.
And yet, Feasey misses the point about the true purpose and effects of advertising. Commercials must first of all make the audience sit up and take notice. And what better way to create empathy, to make potential users identify with the brand, than to give them a constantly-fresh stream of amusing sketches that adhere to an enduring advertising concept: even the most unattainable-looking young women will pay attention.
Certainly, the treatments are uniformly exaggerated and target audiences are perceptive enough to realize this. But the best advertising works precisely because copywriters cloak mundane products in fantasy and dreams. Women fantasize about hugging a Tom Cruise or playing out a hot scene with Ben Affleck. Men entertain fantasy too because, beyond the survival needs for sustenance, heat and shelter, the sex drive is a very compelling one. The fantasy impels men to use Lynx every day (“you never know”) but most know that it would be an unusual young lady indeed who would replay that hat stand pole dance shown by Lynx. Execution is, after all, only delivers the message in some memorable and compelling fashion.
To be credible, nonetheless, advertising must reflect reality. To the millions of mid- and mass-market young men who might like a casual-use product like Lynx, the central character of the ads cannot be “metrosexual”, the forgotten jargon at the time for effeminates and closet homosexuals. Real men, muscled or not, would not empathize with being domesticated for chores or spending “quality time” with bawling infants, just as women cannot forsake their nurturing and nesting instincts for feminist cant.
At the end of the day, advertising at its most creative is capable to taking the feminist road not for its own sake but in an exercise of myth and fantasy, too. In 1998, a TV ad for Chanel No.5 did a new take on that age-hold fable of Little Red Riding Hood as fearless young girl braving the dangers of forested Europe. Top-flight model Estella Warren is shown in a red gown and satin cape ensemble, leaving behind a submissive wolf for a night on the town in Paris. Four centuries after Perrault first wrote down the tale, the saucy French themselves can be relied on to depict the central character in the full bloom of sexual awareness and self-interest.
When Feasey closes in a quandary about how well Lynx advertising appeals to racial minorities and why women comprise nearly half the buyers of the product, one need only recall the nature of advertising to give her working hypotheses for further research. Women buy the product in droves because they know men will be happy to receive Lynx since the fantasy of enchanting women is already central to brand image. As for minorities, there is nothing wrong with hypothesizing that they, too, fantasize about attracting young, White beauties.
References
Feasey, R. (2009). Spray more, get more: Masculinity, television advertising and the Lynx effect. Journal of Gender Studies, 18 (4): 357-368.