“Man’s World” and “Woman’s World”

A Van Heusen vintage ad that uses sexism. By stereotyping, typically women based on gender. It is an insult of the way men see women. In this ad it shows the composition in two sides. The original, a “Man’s world” and the other is a “Woman’s world”. On the “Man’s world” side it shows how the woman is on their knees and have a smile on their face. To deepen on that, she wants to please or in other words satisfy her lover, the expectation that women should consistently be submissive.

The ad is for ties, but it features a situation with a woman serving her lover dinner. At the top of the ad it says, “Show her it’s a man’s world”, basically saying that women have a certain role to play, a lifestyle to put up. That men are superior, or higher level than women. The man is laying in bed with a satisfied smirk on his face, looking down at his lover. This represents men looking down on women and saying that they are at the top and women are at the bottom. Now on to the “Women’s world” side it shows the man on his knees as well, but he is not smiling, he looks disappointed. He shows an aura of dislike, that he shouldn’t being doing this. Secondly, the woman looks down at the man and she not smiling either but gives off a “get a taste of your own medicine” kind of face. What I mean by this is roles are reverse and men are given their own sexiest toxin. The original ad is in the mid- 50th century so since modern day changed over time, they used an alternate universe to point out how ridiculous these ads are.

Advertising used sexism towards women since the first arrangement of advertisement. The history of sexism in advertisements can be way back to the early 50th century, in which the marketing industry were usually focused on the women and their duties as a housewife. Seeing this can make you realize how long women been talked down on. Imagery in the ad is very realistic and is happening not only in the past but still to this day. When it says, “Show her it a man’s world” Men has used that when speaking about women with the use of sexist imagery in the mid-century advertisement. The left side it’s kind of cartoonish and while the right it looks like real people. They use real people on the right instead of making a cartoon because they want the viewer or reader to see that this is real, and this is not to be taken as a joke. They want people to know that sexism is still much alive. To visually see the cracks in the limitations that those roles carry through the ad, but these kinds of role reversal particularly are not needed for men to understand what they make/have made women go through in a misogynist society. It Should it be clear enough for them from looking at the original ad.

The tone in the advertisement is serious, they want the audience to see how men would like if it was reversed on them. For people who are stuck in that mind-set, they want to urge them to stop the stereotypical gender roles. To show that these ad’s in our society will continue to be revealed. Lastly, to not only show that men are the only ones that are expected to be dominate and subservient.

Gender stereotyping in ad’s casually creates real-world beliefs of women doing more work for less respect. For example, women doing all the work is of nearly all cooking and cleaning advertisements. This ad may seem cruel and stupid to us now, but at the time, it was common for advertisements, to represent women as of lower rank than men. This ad is just a further way of showing us that even though it may be dreadful to us now, we have made a drastic change over the years, there is still sexism in ads but not as bad as it was in the 50’s.

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