Media or Society?

In class this week we discussed soap as a commodity and the different ways it is marketed in the media. For a large portion of the class we focused on how advertisements for cleaning and household products are largely targeted towards women and very rarely men. The one exception the class could come up with was a recent towel commercial where a father spills on a table and he is forced to clean it up. However, this example was later scrapped as it was concluded that the children in the commercial explain to their father, “Mom is going to be so mad at you,” once again implying that is the women who care about a clean house and never really the man.

I decided to search on Google images “men using cleaning products” and low and behold the first image that came up was of a woman holding cleaning products and only one picture on the entire page featured a man holding products and the picture somewhat implied him being helpless in a grocery store. I thought it would be interesting to see what movies and films demonstrate these same ideologies or if it is just the brands that seem to stereotype women in their media. Examples that I could find supporting the advertisement stereotypes were Friends with Monica being an OCD neat freak, Desperate Housewives with Bree constantly attempting to be the perfect clone of Martha Stewart, and shows like The Brady Bunch and Gossip Girl who have prominent house maids, not butlers who clean the home. As far as films go the first movie that came to mind was Mr. Mom, which centered on a single father who had to take care of his family alone. Clearly the name is a joke referring to this man’s role as a mom because he must cook and clean. This seemed to be the final key that it was not just cleaning product advertisements, but media in general that has concluded women are in charge of cleaning and cooking for a family, and if they don’t they are most likely bad mothers. Whether this is a problem with media or society in general is an unanswered question, although in my personal opinion I believe the media is simply just representing society’s beliefs in a realistic fashion and sometimes the truth is not always easy to accept.