Sexism in advertising and social permission

Kamil Łuczaj

The main aim of this article is a defence of a hypothesis stating that changes of social consciousness (which permit using sexuality in advertising) enabled replacing discriminative stereotypes with extremely sexist content. Simultaneously, the article presents the evolution of such content and the fact that more radical advertisements raise stronger objections. The main cause of the investigated phenomenon was pointed out to be an internal difficulty of contemporary democracy, which induces a conflict of values. Other determinants are: inconsistent women’s stance, lack of engagement from the Catholic Church, the homo sovieticus complex as well as symbolic violence and sexism immanently enclosed in language. The article analyzes examples of Polish advertising campaigns from 10th Oct. to 10th Dec., 2008. Attention was paid to both linguistic and visual aspects. The theoretical foundations presented were based conceptions by P. Bourdieu, E. Goffman and C. MacKinnon.

KEYWORDS

sexism, advertisement, gender, values, symbolic violence