ADWEEK CRITIQUE: YOU'VE COME A SHORT WAY, BABY By BARBARA LIPPER

A retrospective of women's images in advertising shows how the creative revolution left half of us behind barricades (or bustiers).

There’s no doubt women’s images in advertising have become a lot more enlightened lately. In the last few weeks alone, I’ve reviewed great spots for Nike and AmEx. Each preaches a celebratory idea of power and self-acceptance. But in advertising, it always seems to be one step forward, one step toward meaningless cliche.
For example, we know the ‘e’ word is headed for trouble when empowerment has come to Elsie the Cow. (That’s right – she’s got a pants suit, a business, and a husband, Elmer, who listens). Power babes, power cows: Who gives us this stuff and how does it affect us?
An exhibition starting this week at the One Club in New York called ‘Ninety Years of Women’s Images in Advertising’ offers some insights and context. What’s shocking is to view the brilliantly graphic, award-winning, revolutionary work of the ’60s, this time through the prism of women.
Admittedly, it’s pointless to impose a ’90s PC sensibility on work done 30 years earlier. But it is amazing to see how strict and sexist the gender divisions were in those days. In fact, two ads for Volkswagen, the legendary campaign from Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, seem less like car ads and more like illustrations for Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.
Take the body copy from an early ’60s VW ad that shows a bug with a dented front end. (Wives as bad drivers were an ongoing cultural joke then, as demonstrated by Laura Petrie and Jane Jetson. VW turned it into a selling point.) ‘Women are soft and gentle, but they hit things,’ the ad begins. ‘If your wife hits something in a Volkswagen, it doesn’t hurt you very much . . . ‘ The ad for the VW bus is worse. The headline asks, ‘Do you have the right kind of wife for it?’ One of the questions to see whether your li’l gal stacks up: ‘Can she get a kid’s leg stitched at the office and not phone you until it’s all over?’ (God forbid Dad should be disturbed while his kid is getting stitches.) Obviously, the male copywriter thought he was showing all the facets of being a wacky, quirky gal. All I could think of was how many ad guys’ wives at the time must have been at home, getting the kids’ legs stitched in silence and simmering.
What the show reveals is that the ’60s, the supposed time of free love and revolution, of brash young creative revolutionaries, was actually a time of the strictest divisions and codes in advertising for women.
And where are we now? Well, we’ve come a long way – long enough that Virginia Slims can offer the equivalent of frequent flyer mileage for smokin’ babes. (Half a blackened lung apparently will get you a truly cool black leather biker jacket.) And then there’s the area of breasts, always a magnet for advertising imagery. The melon poster below, for Bamboo lingerie, is part of a series of shock-value knocker visuals created, it seems, to win graphic awards (which it did). While that’s dumb, I find The Lilyette work disturbing. The photography suggests film noir or pulp detective novels. The copywriting seems profoundly male, like the work of an ex-Penthouse editor. In the ad shown, the woman supposedly muses, ‘So who came up with this gravity thing? It’s an evil force for a pair of 34-Ds.’
A second ad takes misogyny to new heights. A woman is shown sitting on a bed in her underwear, looking in the mirror. The writing is based on killer-bitch Basic Instinct male fantasy: ‘I’m his heater. I’m his pain killer . . . his worst nightmare,’ she says. Phooey.
By contrast, the Maidenform ad gets it just right. With bras, context is everything. Here, a laced bra (with a tinge of the erotic) is placed in front of some books by and about women. It’s smart, great-looking, contemporary, and human.
We’ll be discussing all this in a panel I’m chairing on Thursday, March 18, at 6 p.m. at the One Club in New York. Be there – after all, everybody’s a critic.
Copyright Adweek L.P. (1993)