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Roles dominate the everyday lives of almost every person on this planet we call Earth. There are professional roles, age roles, socioeconomic class roles, marriage roles, sibling roles, and child roles. There are also gender roles. These begin to be conditioned within each one of us from the time we are born. The media has a strong voice in our society and has plenty to say about gender roles. Some of it is good, and some of it may not be. Even with the internet and television at their highest levels to date, magazines still have a strong hold as a big deciding factor on gender roles. One such type of magazine is a magazine centered around sport compact cars. This field of magazines happens to have a solid attitude towards the way it presents females in society. Let us look at the expectations, reactions and socialization issues as viewed by these magazines.
After thumbing through five different popular sport compact car magazines, it was quite easy to find a unifying expectation of women. Any of the ads that contain women in these magazines shows them as sexual objects. The companies use the sex appeal of the women photographed to attract more sales. The vast majority of the women presented are scantily clad at most. They are shown in next-to-nothing swimsuits, catholic school girl outfits, and other forms of clothing that emphasize the bust and derriere. These women are typically positioned in mildly provocative positions or leaning against a car.
When men see these ads, they are exposed to the idea that being sexual objects is all women are good for. These advertisements are inadvertently promoting this demoralized stereotype of women. By conditioning the beliefs and ideas of men this way, they are directly influencing how men react to women in general. These ads also present the idea that if the men that read the magazine buy the parts or services advertised they will be more attractive to women. This can be directly seen on page 21 of the July 2002 issue of Import Tuner. This particular ad is for Kaminari Aerodynamics. It pictures a slightly overweight man in a Honda Accord outfitted with some of the company’s exterior body modifications. It also shows five scantily clad females ogling at the man who has supposedly become more attractive because he put this company’s parts on his car. This presentation of values presents women out for the richest, strongest, most powerful man and his car.
While men are the substantial majority of the readers of these magazines, there are women who read them. Seeing women presented this way could socialize female readers the idea that they are not supposed to be in the driver’s seat, but in the passenger’s seat of the car. They should take the submissive role under men. They could get the idea that women don’t know anything about cars except how to look pretty standing next to or against them. They could come to think that the only way to attract men is to dress in minimal amounts of clothing and wear lots of makeup.
The advertisements featured in these magazines present many ideas, beliefs and assumptions about women that are out-dated, stereotypical and flat out wrong. They do not present women as the equals to men that women are and should be presented as. They do nothing but promote age-old derogatory traditions in relation to females and their relationships with men. All of that just to make an extra buck. These expectations, reactions and socialization practices must stop. Automotive magazines are supposed to be about automobiles. There are entire magazines devoted to this type of depiction of women, let us keep it out of automotive magazines. If I want to see half naked women depicted as nothing but sex objects, I’ll go pick up a Maxim or FHM, not a car magazine.
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