What was the first thing that went through your mind when you saw the above advertisement?
Me? Why Nazi-occupied Colorado of course.
No, really. Specifically, the end of the following segment from Chapter 6 of Philip K. Dick’s classic alternative-history book, The Man in the High Castle (1962):
…Her shift at the judo parlor did not begin until noon; this was her free time, today. Seating herself on a stool at the counter she put down her shopping bags and began to go over the different magazines.
The new Life, she saw, had a big article called: TELEVISION IN EUROPE: GLIMPSE OF TOMORROW. Turning to it, interested, she saw a picture of a German family watching television in their living room. Already, the article said, there was four hours of image broadcast during the day from Berlin. Someday there would be television stations in all the major European cities. And, by 1970, one would be built in New York.
The article showed Reich electronic engineers at the New York site, helping the local personnel with their problems. It was easy to tell which were the Germans. They had that healthy, clean, energetic, assured look. The Americans, on the other hand — they just looked like people. They could have been anybody.
One of the German technicians could be seen pointing off somewhere, and the Americans were trying to make out what he was pointing at. I guess their eyesight is better than ours, she decided. Better diet over the last twenty years. As we’ve been told; they can see things no one else can. Vitamin A, perhaps? (source, right)
Of course, regardless of hierarchy and relationship, people do need to point things out in the distance to each other sometimes. But in advertisements featuring both sexes in Phil K. Dick’s time however, somehow it always seemed to be the men that were pointing things out to then women, as noted by sociologist Erving Goffman in Gender Advertisements in 1979:
On the positive side though, the second thing the advertisement reminded me of was a social studies textbook that I read in my final year of high school (back in 1993), which noted how rife such imagery was in earlier editions of a science textbook that I also happened to be using. But which had long since been removed, and indeed subsequent studies based on Goffman’s work – Belknap, P., & Leonard, W. M. (1991), “A conceptual replication and extension of Erving Goffman’s study of gender advertisements,” Sex Roles, 25(3/4), 103-118 for instance – confirmed that examples in advertisements were (by then) also so rare that it was not even worth looking for them. And much more recent studies of Korean advertisements (listed here) have come to much the same conclusions of them too.
But still, they do occur occasionally. Anybody remember this commercial I analyzed last September for instance, of which even just the visuals alone convey the message that only men are serious and thoughtful enough to be put in charge of your finances?
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To which now can be added the ad I saw on the subway this morning, which feels like it’s at least 30 years out of date. Or is that just me?
p.s. Yes, I’m aware that, technically speaking, Colorado isn’t occupied by Nazis in the book, but is rather in a buffer zone between the Japanese “Pacific States of America” and the Nazi “United States of America.” Alas, that wouldn’t have had quite the same impact as an opening line however!
The Grand Narrative 
this kind of imagery is very very common in school advertisements, I have seen other school adverts that have similar tendencies.
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Oh, really? The same sort of gender roles you mean?
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I see a lot of interesting connections in the Korean ads you point out but this isn’t one of them. It seems like this is really a stretch. I’ve seen (and indeed been in) a lot of school ads myself and they seem to be nothing more than a poor attempt to paint a picture of antithesis to the reality of the drudgery that is Korean high school most of the time.
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The point is that 30-40 years ago, there would be illustrations in textbooks and ads on the street and so on featuring males showing or pointing things out to females – in other words, taking an executive role – far far more often than the opposite (if indeed there were any at all). Because that imbalance sent the implicit message that it was “natural” for men to always lead and women to always follow though, then they’ve been phased out of most school textbooks around the world, and advertisers now avoid using them also (albeit mainly for various economic and industry-related reasons, not just because its’ sexist).
So, there’s no problem whatsover with the ad itself. And the fact that it’s a school ad is irrelevant really, other than the male and female students being equals. Imagine if you saw ads like this everyday though – and ones with the guys always taking the lead like in this one that is, not school ads per se – and I’m sure you can see feminists’ objectations.
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I went to a women’s college. The college had a coed Master of Art in Teaching English program and one of the primary photos used to push this program showed a man with a book open and women on either side of him, fawning over what he was showing them in the book. That photo also made me crazy for the reasons you talk about above.
And this photo was still being used less than 10 years ago.
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Thanks, and I understand. Korean TV too usually has men demonstrating how cleaning products work to crowds of housewives, or usually only male scientists explaining sciencey things like toothpaste and yogurt drinks. Not always of course, and that sort of thing isn’t only confined to Korea, but it’s still quite noticeable.
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Really, really strange question, feel free not to answer . . . was it ASC?
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Yeah, we went over this on um…one of the dating websites. Doing it Korean Style. We graduated from the same college, probably around the same time.
And do you remember that picture???
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Why so we did! Wasn’t sure if you were the same Amanda though. . .
I don’t remember the photo in question, partially because I never had much to do with any of the programs that would lead into our one and only (and now defunct) graduate program. I wonder if the photo was chosen a) stupidly, from a stock image gallery or b) deliberately to highlight that the program was co-ed? In either case, a bad choice, particularly at our college!
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Amanda, my school has a photo it’s used on a number of pamphlets. It features me with a book open and two female high school students on either side of me fawning over what I’m showing them in the book. The book is a science textbook written entirely in Korean.
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Ah, I see. But when I first looked at that ad I really didn’t see anything particularly noteworthy at all. Perhaps I’ve just been in Korea too long.
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