Saturday, 13 February 2016

Gender Representation . . .

Yorkie


The yorkie chocolate bar by nestle has an interestingly unique wrapper compared to other chocolate bars, it contains the slogans ''it's not for girls'' and ''do not feed the birds''. This wrapper conforms to gender stereotypes, pointing girls out as different and deficient. This links to Lakoff's Deficit model, suggesting that women are not as powerful as men and that their speech and actions are less important than men's. The words ''do not feed the birds'' makes it seem as if women are not worthy of this food, fitting the Deficit theory. This is also an example of semantic derogation with the key word being ''birds'' referring to women, although the origin of this word was used to talk about women in a good way it seems the new use of it is equal to saying a word like 'babe'.



BIC Pens For Her

This set of pens designed for women are in the colour scheme of mostly pinks, purples and pastel colours. As if the stereotypically female colours of the pens was not enough, the packaging the pens are surrounded by has a soft purple floral design to add to the stereotypes set for women. The fact that BIC released a range of pens for women comes across as slightly offencive to the female customers of BIC as it seems to suggest that they should not be using the regular pens as they are unsuitable for females. This connects to the deficit model with men being higher in status than women, eg the normal BIC pens are male and thus BIC created pens for women.

No comments:

Post a Comment