Gender stereotypes tend to target women most of the time. They are seen as seductive, sexual symbols or housewives, someone who do not have much power and need to be protected and looked after. Women have always seen to be weak. At least, those are the few qualities I have seen in advertising for women. You barely see women wearing business clothes and working, but you see women in lounge wear and taking care of their homes. Nissan's #withdad commercial is an example of the housewife version of a woman. The woman stays home and look after her child while her NASCAR driver husband goes to work. The commercial shows that he bare goes home and the wife takes care of the child. It is referring to the idea that males go to work while females stay home and take care of the family. However, I do not think it is fair to women to always be seen with this kind of qualities. There are female NASCAR drivers out there but there are barely any commercials about them, and here, Nissan shows a male NASCAR driver and a stay-home wife. This clearly shows the role in the household and depicts the wife as weak and cannot work. However, we are not in that time when women need to obey their husbands and work as housewives. We are in the twentieth century. Today, women have their own jobs, they no longer take care of their children and husbands. They are independent, more specifically, they are financially independent. They are as smart as men and work as hard as men. They are able to do the things that men can do disregarding the biological difference. So, why should women be a symbol of sex or housewives? Why can't men be a symbol of sex or stay-home husbands?
We have to promote better understandings to people in today's society that women are strong and independent figures. We have to show and prove to ourselves that we are not as outdated and uneducated enough as we were in the old days, to think that women are still the stay-home moms and sex symbol. We are educated people, we have to promote equality for both female and male. Advertising has an advantage to change how people view and treat females, thus it also has huge responsibility to motivate how people think about gender. We have to take advantage of advertising to promote positive and strong qualities of women and grant them the respect that they deserve.
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