Ok, ok, so we’ve all seen commercials like this Mr. Clean commercial before. Looks normal, right? I mean, the advertisement is for a better cleaning product. More efficient. Easier on your hands, your back, you pocketbook, whatever. No big deal. We all love the friendly, bald giant’s face staring back at us from our spotless countertops and bathroom floors. It denotes a sense of friendliness, comfort, cleanliness, or what have you. No problems here. But, let me ask you to think again. Let me ask you who is cleaning? Who is cleaning in this commercial and in every Mr. Clean commercial? Who is cleaning in every vacuum commercial, every dish soap commercial, every laundry commercial? I can answer that for you because it is, in fact, NOT Mr. Clean. It is a woman. It is a woman, approximately in her early forties, in an empty house with multiple rooms. And she is white. She has children and maybe they are in the commercial but maybe they aren’t. Either way, you know she has children. She also has a husband. He is never home, though. He must be at work. I mean, he must have bought the house that she must now keep clean. She must stay home. And clean.

“How can you get all of this from that commercial?” you might ask. Well, it is because that woman who I just described is exactly who this commercial is targeted for. If you think about American society’s persistent gendered roles within the family (as well as in the “working world”), than you may be able to see where I am coming from. Although America may look as though it has come quite a long way from the 1950’s mindset, it indeed still perpetuates it’s own embrace of that comforting, submissive lifestyle so pervasive within TV Land reruns. While many women do indeed take advantage of more recently “gained” (I say gained in parenthesis because it should be more like “fought for” or “taken back”) opportunities regarding relationships, marriage, career, family, etc., there is still most definitely an upheld ideal that reinforces the American nuclear family.

So why do we still see advertising marketed this way? That’s a huge question. One that I am most likely not qualified to answer. At least not any more than the next person. I suppose that there is something to be said for the sheer fact that it works. I mean, it has been working and it continues to work. We are comfortable with it, for the most part. It is just a part of our everyday subjection. Women clean and men work in high-rise offices. That is what the marketers and the advertising consultants will stick to as long as they can. And as long as our patriarchal, sexist, racist and homophobic nurturing culture doesn’t drastically stand up for it’s real civic rights, this angle of marketing will fuel the marketers and advertising consultant’s salaries.

Now, I know that suggesting a full-on overthrow of a capitalist society that bases all of it’s motivations off of the largest possible profit margin and not ever any kind of ethical message for the good and common decency of mankind is a bit of a stretch, BUT the tyranny of such a power structure within advertising SHOULD be criticized here. One of the problems is that WE, as consumers, as individuals, as human beings merely existing within society, are being subjected to the psychological manipulation of our own exploitation by advertising. Where these commercials appear to be, for the most part, harmless on their own, when added together are an oppressing force of gender for both women AND men, a segregating component for different races and a sexualizing travesty upon our youth. There has GOT to be a way that businesses can sell their products down other avenues that do not reinforce the gender binary, revolve around whiteness and take agency away from children. But what is it?

Well, for starters companies could hire more females. More blacks. More Hispanics. More black women. More Hispanic women. How about some transgenders as well? Give them a shot at corporate America. Change corporate America to reflect America. Oh, I know I sound idealist. After all, who is going to read this anyway? I am not the first to think or suggest this and I definitely won’t be the last. I don’t care, though, because if so many people are thinking it and suggesting it than there must be some collective pushback against this “dominant” mentality of Mad Men. As Jean Kilbourne encourages her viewers in “Killing Us Softly” to think of themselves “primarily as citizens, rather than consumers,” the message of involvement is key here. As not only the companies that we support (with our hard earned money) should consist of staffs that reflect society, so too should society be aware of when the companies don’t meet our standards. The REAL problem is changing our own minds first.

“Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women” – Jean Kilbourne, 2010