Advertisers distorted portrayal of women as needing products to feel and look beautiful distort our realities.
Women have too much baggage because advertisers trap us into thinking we need stuff to be desirable. They forget that we’re smart and powerful just as we are.
Graduating from high school in 1977, four years of college, workforce in the early eighties, reader of The Women’s Room…. I raged about how advertisers, TV shows, and movies target women. Weary in the 21st century, I shake my head, How have advertisers not changed their approach to women over the decades?
My Baggage Story
Graduated high school in the late 70s, four years of college, into the workforce in the early eighties…. Throughout all that, I raged about how advertisers and TV target women. Weary, today I shake my head: Seriously, how have advertisers not changed their approach to women over the decades?
Our young women don’t know our battles. Recently, I said to a female drafter ( draftsmen), in humor, that a man-door should be renamed a people-door. She jumped down my throat about being one of those horrible, obnoxious feminists. Twenty years my junior, I thought: Chicka, do you think you’d have this job without feminists opening that field?
Today’s rant is how commercials portray women:
- Talking to our mops
- Loving bathroom cleaners
- Being the only adult to care for sick kids
- Needing eye lashes that look like black widow spider legs
- Colored eyelids that look like a Crayola box did a home-run slide onto our skin
- Eyebrows tweaked to pencil thinness and arched so far onto our foreheads that I marvel and think: How do they do that?
In other words, women are still earning less than men ($.80 to the dollar), but still expected to shop and display ourselves, in the various roles of our lives, as if we had three times the amount of money and double the amount of time needed to look perfect.
A Quick List of a Few Costs Unique to Women:
- Mascara – $10 – $30
- Eye shadow – $10
- Morning and evening face lotions – $25 each every 6 months
- Special eye lotion – $15
- Shampoo, conditioner and shine in a bottle – $15 each … that just covers my head! My husband gets whatever shampoo is on sale and doesn’t use the other stuff.
This recent tirade is brought on during a relocation of my bathroom items into my husband’s bathroom. (Separate bathrooms = the key to our happy marriage—this works for me and water-everywhere-man.) He’s leaving for a week, so I’m taking advantage of his empty bathroom in order to paint mine. A mirror fell off the door, gouging the wall. Fixing the hole meant I could finally change the color. While I haven’t been unhappy with my husband’s wall-color choices since I moved in, soft-buttery cream throughout the house lacks the vibrancy and warmth that I need.
Must. Have. Color.
Hence my desire to have a bit of deep Tuscan orange on the bathroom walls to accent the sea-blue photographs of Wales displayed there.
Anyone who has witnessed me painting anything large or small has seen the utter lack of neatness that I have while so doing. Once when my siblings and I painted multiple rooms in our parents’ home, they applauded my attentiveness to edging and ability to smoothly get the ceiling rolled. However, applause was held when it came to the mess that is me. Invariably paint wound up everywhere. I don’t know how it happens, it just does.
A million years ago in Red Lodge when I painted the outside of my little house on Word Avenue (great place for a writer to live), I wore a set of my brother-in-law’s clothes overtop of my own. When I was done applying a coat of primer and two coats of paint to the house and garage, his t-shirt and jeans could stand by themselves because of the amount of paint I’d gotten on them.
But dang, my property looked good.
That’s the explanation for the full move from one room to the other. There was no way I could simply toss a drop cloth over the vanity medicine chest, and toilet, paint, then access the items I need on a daily basis. No, it had to come out so I could thoroughly tape, newspaper and drop cloth every available space. This is when I realized I have too much stuff. And I’m a low maintenance woman!
The Female Products (baggage) I had to move
- Dish holding: mascara, eyebrow pencil, hair clips and eye shadow I haven’t used in six months.
- Containers holding: cotton balls, Q-tips, bobby pins, face powder
- Goop for my curly hair days (2); goop for my straight days (2)
- Spray to make my hair shiny
- Other hair spray to hold it in place
- Hair dryer
- Flat iron
- Special, sister-Jackie-made soap for face washing (from medicine chest)
- Face lotion
- Deodorant
- Floss
- Toothpaste
- Two toothbrushes (one regular and one electric)
- Dixie cups
- Body lotion
- Magnifying mirror (hey, I am over 60)
- Shampoo & conditioner
- Body soap
- Face soap (from shower)
- Razor and shaving cream
- Shower cap (for all the days I don’t want to deal with my curly/straight hair)
- Nail polish in case I feel like repairing my toe job (so this also means polish remover, toe separator, manicure set)
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Alex is leaving on his trip. His shaving kit contains: yes, a razor and shaving cream, deodorant, a hairbrush, floss and toothpaste. That’s it. He’s good to go.
I can’t even change bathrooms with that little amount of stuff.
Do I need each of these items? That depends. Frankly, I don’t care anymore what my hair looks like. Half-way down my back or three-inches short, I have never, ever been able to control my crazy red—now multi-colored as I refuse to dye it any longer—hair. (My Uncle D always asks me what my hair is doing—now.) Standing at the mirror, doing the finishing touches, maybe adding some hair spray … I look fabulous. Leaving the house, I get in my car, drive to my destination, check the mirror before I get out and, What the heck happened? The hair is out of control again.
My ongoing battle with trying to tame my hair is the complete definition of insanity.
[bctt tweet=”My ongoing battle with trying to tame my hair is the complete definition of insanity.” username=””]
As Women, Advertisers Brainwash Us into Thinking We Need
- Painted toenails (I sometimes do this because I think they look funny when they pop out from beneath bedsheets in the morning– making me laugh).
- Laquered fingernails (not me—ever).
- Eyelids in various colors (rarely me).
- Dyed hair (me until three years ago).
- The latest fashionable clothes (not me).
- Perfumes (not me as the bottle I bought four years ago finally ran out).
- Body washes, creams, lotions, you can add to my list … that we need these things in order to be beautiful, taken seriously in the workplace, catch a man, be successful…
Whatever the current programming is.
Do We Have to Succumb to Advertiser Bias?
No longer dying my hair, I love the variety of colors this red head has revealed: blonde, black, strawberry red, white, grey, silver. I cut it off and had it short for several months the way so many 50+ year old women tend to do (and don’t they look incredible!), now it’s half-way down my back again. It’s a positive to save money on hair color and time at the stylist (I miss you). Also, I don’t need six different goo’s/sprays to use on it or special color-keeping shampoo and conditioner!
Don’t fear, I’m not going “granola” and letting my mustache grow in or not shaving my armpits. I like being a woman and looking feminine. But following these requirements can be poverty-inducing. Alex pays twenty bucks for a great hair cut at the local Italian barber every six weeks. Most women pay a lot more than that and go far more often—only for a cut.
What do Men Think About Female Baggage?
I have yet to meet a man who told me blazing red lips or fingertips were the things that made them fall in love with their woman. That if he caught her dancing with her mop and glowing with pride over a shiny toilet, he swooned. What men have told me it comes down to is the woman’s personality, beliefs, morals, ethics, and life plans that they share. Not whether or not she matched her shoes with her purse and coordinated her eyeliner with her eye shadow.
The above spewed forth from radical me, I have to stop for one minute and acknowledge that there are women who color their hair for the fun of changing shades every month. There are women who put on dramatic eye shadow and look positively dashing—making a statement they want to make. Some women love fashion and wear the latest clothes with the panache of Cher in a Bob Mackie dress. To you I say: You go girl!
To Advertisers Pounding Women with Inferior-inducing Commercials, I say: Stuff it!
If doing these girly girl things makes YOU happy and brings YOU daily joy, then I support your doing it. It’s when we do these things because of societal pressures that I call foul.
When I put my bathroom back together at the end of the week, I’ll examine each item and see what I need in order to look presentable to the world at large, what I like having in my cupboard, and what can get tossed out never to be re-purchased!
What about you—succumb to those advertisers or do you find yourself rebelling a tad more every day?
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Letting the hair go white/gray has been a revelation! So freeing! Can’t believe I did that for 40+ years. Makeup has always just been mascara and eyebrows. Now it’s always eyebrows (can’t stand white eyebrows but why is that?) and sometimes mascara. Still have about 4 different hair products but when you have hair like mine, what’s a girl to do? Continually purging.
You and your crazy curls, Jackie! Maybe because our eyelashes are still brown, but the eyebrows are fading? I can’t stand them white either. Wonder if there are eyebrow dying kits… Oh stop with the girl stuff!
Since quarantine, I rarely ever wear makeup. The other day, hubby and I went to the beach and I did my whole makeup thing. I turned to my husband and said, “wow, don’t I look like a girl?”
I can’t believe I’ve spent almost my entire life wearing makeup every day.
That’s funny, Erica! This has changed many of our perceptions about what is really necessary and what isn’t–even make up which can just be fun to do! I hope the beach was wonderful and safe!
ok Red, i have got a paint story for you! let me know when you are free for a laugh!
I’m ready–I will catch you on email, Todd!
Once I stoppes coloring my hair I slowly stopped the make up. Reduced it to just eyebrows and mascara. Now I hardly remember to do that when I leave the house. Bill says I don’t need that crap anyway. Hair products hmm can’t get rid of those or I look like Medusa!
Brahaha! I have seen you do Medusa! But you are adorable any way, any day!
This blog pauses me to ponder the age old question need/want for self happiness. I’m in the less is more stage. Cleaned out the kitchen drawers including the junk drawer yesterday. Our son will thank me when he doesn’t have to go through stuff. After all how many plastic containers dies one really need?
We have been on that journey together almost since we met, haven’t we? Purge, purge, and purge again. We move our plastic containers to the paint cabinet–I am really good at wrecking paint supplies, so this works out great. Ha. I forbade Alex to have a junk drawer when I moved in. He has slowly evolved one that I must attack very soon!
Totally endorse the idea os separate bathrooms. My house has a men’s room and a women’s room. Thus my wife doesn’t have to undergo the horror of a couple of shaved whiskers in the sink and my son and I don’t have to wade through dozens of mysterious bottles, tubes and boxes in order to find something in the medicine cabinet.
I laughed out loud with your comment, Ken. Way funny! I do not know how my Dad survived with 4 kids (3 close together), his wife, usually a dog (has nothing to do with anything), and 1 bathroom! Hmmm, not sure how any of us survived! Maybe Mom had us on a schedule.
Hi RoseMary. I’ve slowly been changing how I feel about the expectations of others. I’m very comfortable in my own skin, at a weight that works for me without sacrifice, while still enjoying the beauty of being a woman. We are so fortunate that at our age, we can make guilt free choices.
Well said, Doreen. Now, how do we teach that to young women the way I wish I had been taught? Particularly about high heels! I never understood the point (get it?), but wore them because I am so short. I should have been able to say, I’m short, so what! ha ha
We’ve downsized twice which helps one focus about how much stuff we don’t. For example, did I need my parents’ tax returns from 1950? (That should be a rhetorical question , but I stood there and asked it to myself IRL.) Ever since I stopped being a real lawyer (as opposed to one who still has a law license for old times sake), my collection of clothes and grooming paraphernalia has been vastly reduced. Neither the dog nor my husband seem to care if I mostly just rotate my 3 pairs of nearly identical black sweatpants.
Er, as someone still holding onto those old tax returns (I’m sure mom is rolling her eyes at archivist me), I identify with what you’re saying, Suzanne!
Ah, the beauty of working from home. I’ve retained two suits from my corporate days and one pair–the only pair of comfortable Etienne pumps. We’re rocking it, right?
I’ve noted before how I like weeding things out, and I still do so from time to time, but I have less and less stuff all the time I can do that with. The real challenge is going to come if and when I go the RV thing for a while.
You mean when you get that RV for sure, Jeri. I’ve come to know and admire your determination. It’ll happen! Here’s to us have more flowers in our yards and less stuff inside our homes!
Life is so incremental. We get by with so little but as time goes by, we add one more thing then one more thing and before you know it, we are bogged down in SHTUFF! I say get rid of it all and go el naturel….I’ll do that after you do!
If I weren’t so afraid of scaring small children everywhere, I would give up the hair products right now! You and my niece have the right idea: keep it short and simple!