Unilever, the firm responsible for brands such as Dove, Lynx and Magnum, has promised to shake up its portrayal of women, after a research project the company carried out found that just 3% of women in adverts are shown in professional, managerial jobs; 1% are shown as being funny and 2% intelligent.
During the two-year research project, 90% of women Unilever spoke to felt they were presented as sex objects in the adverts and 30% thought adverts were made for the male gaze. Curiously, however, just 40% said they felt that women in adverts did not represent them. Which leaves 60% who presumably think: yep, I too get extremely excited by a reduced-price gateau.
So, without further ado. Here are 11 top female stereotypes found in advertising – all of which we should really see the back of.
1. Blue period woman
It’s a moment all women recognise, one we’ve all experienced at least once. The horrible, dawning realisation that a blue stain is creeping across your white jeans. Except, of course, we haven’t. Because blood isn’t blue and nobody wears white jeans apart from Liz Hurley.
It’s not too difficult to see the reasoning behind this representation of a period as a Smurf sneeze in a test tube: men quite often tend to weird out about anything to do with periods, and men watch television and use bus stops too.
One of the first blue period adverts was this 1997 effort from Always. Then you couldn’t stop blue period adverts coming – they rolled in like waves. Long reads have been written, parodies produced, and in 2015, this video from the “brand controller” of Bodyform, went viral. In 2016, the company finally released a period ad featuring actual blood.
Let’s also not forget the trope of the woman who, contrary to all people ever*, is really happy to get her period. Usually there is a celebration on a beach somewhere. Or ecstatic roller-skating down pavements despite regulations against that kind of thing. Or, as this Kotex advert has it: “How do I feel about my period? I love it!”
*There is the obvious pregnancy-related exception to this rule.
2. Henpecking woman
You know these ads. They tend to feature a man, reading the paper, eye-rolling while a wife wags a finger in the background. Or a man with both hands dramatically throwing his hands over his ears. Sometimes it’s a piece-to-camera shrug.
Women. Can’t they just button it? Women, eh? Women! Whaddya gonna do? is the general message of these adverts. Often it’s not even clear what product is being advertised, to the point where a suspicion creeps in that these are just 30 seconds of paid airtime from MRAs (men’s rights activists).
3. Excited-by-laundry woman
I don’t know about you, but laundry does not fill me with joy. Laundry does not scream FUN! Laundry does not make me want to throw all of my clothes in the air with abandon like Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby. But women in adverts can’t get enough of laundry. They bury their noses in it. Skip and dance like Maria von Trapp on the mountain while pegging it up outside. They tut at tops with stains on while merrily nailing a three-pointer throwing a skirt in the basket.
All this is rubbish, of course. Because all women actually use their floor as extra wardrobe space and end up wearing a sports bra when no other ones are clean (or is this just me?)
4. Spin-and-grin woman
The industry term for that instantly recognisable hair swish, whether the model is advertising shampoo, conditioner or hair dye. Woman turns, is startled - but also really happy.
There are way too many examples to include here, but this Cheryl for L’Oréal advert is surely the pièce de résistance – in which the singer nails the spin and grin while carrying an umbrella on a … er, bright, sunny day.
Of course, there are also the women who take regular showers under secluded waterfalls in exotic locations. Sometimes while pretty much fully dressed. And, because Cheryl is the queen of the hair care advert, I also like this one, in which she nonchalantly chills on a chaise longue before hugging a union cushion like it’s a life-jacket.
5. Catwoman
As if women with cats aren’t already disparaged enough, cat food brands portray them as obsessed people who talk to their cats, hang with their cats, pretend to be cats by crawling across the carpets, or are so into their cats’ food, which is so good that they’re sniffing their cats’ food enthusiastically, even though it is rabbit offal. Yum! And where are the men with cats? Why is it always men featured in adverts for dog food and women in adverts for cat food?
6. IBS woman
Which of us hasn’t stopped abruptly in the street, clutching our midriff, and pursed our lips with abdominal pain, before popping a pill, emitting an orange and yellow glow with lots of arrows swirling in different directions and feeling amazing again? I know I do this all the time. Every time I see a woman stop abruptly in the street I assume this is what is going to happen. And then something utterly banal happens instead. Like them checking their phone. Or narrowing their eyes at street signs.
Is it any wonder I sometimes feel underwhelmed? This 2015 Buscopan ad is typical. A woman in a supermarket sniffs an apple (women love sniffing things), before a concerned look passes her face. Then, well, you know the rest…
The other thing, of course, is how pleased people seem to be despite living with probably very debilitating bowel conditions. And who knew Crohn’s disease could be cured with a 200mg yoghurt?
7. Supermum
She does it all! She’s thrilled about it! She is an embodiment of the statistic that 87% of women do more housework than their partners! No, that manic grin isn’t the sign of a nervous breakdown – it’s because she’s just absolutely electrified at having to do literally everything in the house and take care of the kids as well, no seriously it’s awesome and totally fine!!!
Supermum cooks. She cleans. She feeds her entire family of seven with a single fish finger. She packs her husband’s lunchbox (pickle sandwiches with a side of anthrax). She picks lint out from the sides of couches, from her trodden-down soul. To really ram the point home Dove (Unilever!) once even named an official campaign ad “Supermom”. Asda has a lot to answer for.
8. White couch woman
This woman thinks she is super mum but she isn’t. Because she makes every single rookie error in the book. She feeds her kids on a white couch for God’s sake, in an entirely white living room, in white clothes. She lets her offspring run through the house with muddy feet because she thinks it will be easy to clean up with one square of single-ply sheet toilet paper. She has no concept of cleanliness or hygiene despite advertising products that are sold on the basis of precisely that. She’s too busy showing her friends her artfully arranged pebble collection.
9. Hairless shaving woman
It’s a truth universally acknowledged, by advertisers, that women shave their already hairless legs. There they are, propping up their already bald pins on the side of the bath, hacking away at the smooth flesh. Here they are in the shower, cutting skin to ribbons because there is literally no hair left to remove.
And who recalls – I’m sorry, I mean who can forget – the 1972 Immac advert with the silk scarf? Woman attempts to slide a silk scarf down her pins (because, obviously). Woman thwarted by possible single stick of stubble on otherwise sideboard-smooth leg. After Immac: silk scarf descends like a practised firefighter on a pole. It’s a sort of visual poetry, to be honest.
10. Woman who can barely do sport
Impulse, the body spray that we left at the counter when we turned 15, along with Tammy Girl jackets with Chinese dragons on the back, gave us the wonderful series of adverts in which women played sports with their arms held down by their sides because they were too stupid to remember to wear deodorant and too ashamed by the reality of sweating while doing physical exercise. Sometimes it wasn’t even physical exercise – it was just normal, everyday activity.
More recent sports campaigns include #ThisGirlCan, by Sport England, which has inexplicably been hailed as a breakthrough for feminism and girl power, despite it being incredibly patronising to basically be yelling “Hey, good job!” because someone with a vagina manages to understand the buttons on a treadmill or static bicycle for longer than five minutes.
11. Woman super-excited by food
Food excites me. I love food. I’m a big fan of roast potatoes, and bananas, and risotto and Oreos. But women in adverts LOVE food. They cannot get enough of food. They look at food the way a teenager at their first festival looks at a bag of pills they’ve just found on the ground, or England fans look at a fixture against Iceland. You can almost see the emoji hearts in their eyes.
The most obvious example is the dulcet tones of Helen McCrory espousing the orgasmic joys of M&S’s tender rump steak kebabs, fresh pepper and wild rocket while Groove Armada’s At the River literally plays in the background.
But there’s also the women who, say, high-five over cereal bars. Or throw their eyes heavenwards in response to the sexual thrill of a pre-packaged mousse. I often expect these adverts to end in women rolling around in the respective foodstuff, smearing fruit blends from a brand new juicer across themselves. It wouldn’t be a stretch.
Seriously: women are not like this. We just eat food in a normal way. And we don’t shave our legs if they are already without hair. We don’t go around whipping our bouncy locks over our shoulders. So let’s hope Unilever follows through on its promise – and then we can all throw our freshly laundered clothes in the air to celebrate this new direction.