These roles generally cast men as dominant forces of masculinity, leaders in the home and at work, breadwinners, thinkers, actors, do-ers. In contrast, women are typically shown as weak and delicate followers, loving caretakers who serve to please and control men with sexuality and femininity.
While broken from time to time, these molds are overwhelmingly reinforced in media today.
Advertisers, especially, focus on the shy, dainty, sexualized females as models of femininity, and men are usually defined as confident, brooding individualists.
In print ads specifically, female body parts are typically cut off or isolated in the frame of the photograph.
This is an ad for a cell phone.
This is an ad for a computer programing training program.
Images like these symbolically objectify women in the eyes of both male and female viewers, and can lead to low self-esteem and unrealistic expectations. Images of men in advertising emphasize the idea that men are superior to women and often use them to fulfill their own desires.
Funny, I'd expect the opposite is true.
Today, Axe ads seem to be among the worst offenders. They typically consist of an average looking man age 18 to 30 who is surprised to find that after using the axe product shown in the ad, women are enthusiastically, sometimes violently attracted to him. Sometimes, women can be degraded without even being shown in the ad at all. Here are some examples, courtesy of axe.
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