"I don't pay attention to ads. I just tune them out. They have no effect on me"
{03:00] At at the same time, everyone in America still feels personally exempt from the influence of advertising. So wherever I go, what I hear more than anything else is, "I don't pay attention to ads. I just tune them out. They have no effect on me" Now I hear this most often from people wearing Gap t-shirts, but that's another story.
It certainly is true, in fact it's more true than ever, that advertising is the foundation of the mass media. The primary purpose of the mass media is to sell products. Advertising does sell products of course, but it also sells a great deal more than products. It sells values, it sells images, it sells concepts of love, of sexuality, of romance, of success, and perhaps most important of all, of normalcy.
[12:26] And what they (the two ads) show us, very vividly, is that men and women inhabit very different worlds. Men basically don't live in a world where their bodies are routinely scutinised, criticized and judged, whereas women do.
[30:40] In general, human qualities are divided up, polarised, and labelled masculine, and feminine. And then the feminine is consistently devalued.... which causes men to devalue not just their feminine side, but all those qualities that are labelled feminine by the culture. And by that I mean the qualities like compassion, cooperation, nurture-rence, empathy, sensitivity. We may get lip service to these qualities but in fact they get very low priority in our society and we all lose, and we all lose very badly when we are told one gender can only have one sex of human qualities and one gender only the other. We obviously end up being only half or less of what we otherwise might be, and certainly this dehumanizes all of us, men as well as women.