Growing up, there was a clear line between what girls and boys were meant to like. Adverts were very clearly targeted at one sex over another: those for cute baby dolls, easy-bake ovens and plastic vacuum cleaners with faces on them showed little girls with sparkly hairbands happily playing either with other little girls or alone.
Looking back, it’s almost shocking to see how much we were groomed, how early the indoctrination starts about what is expected of a woman. If that’s what you’ve always seen and what your parents saw, then why would you think anything was wrong with it? After all, it’s all a bit of harmless fun, isn’t it? Only it’s not.
I have come to an age where expectations are running high. Not from me, but from everyone around me. I am mostly quite happy with my lot in life: it is, after all, the life I chose for myself, and yet, despite this, I find people constantly trying to bend me into a status quo that I have thus far shown very little desire for. Friends and members of my family constantly remind me that I am getting older and that I should perhaps take on a more “mature” way of being. However, when asking people why they are so eager when I am not, they can’t really explain why. And this is perhaps the greatest damage that the aforementioned harmless fun has done: it has perpetuated the belief that all girls want the same things and can’t possibly be fulfilled without them.
Despite all our virtue signalling and claims of equality, every passing year shows me that there is still precious little tolerance for those who would rather be Maleficent than Sleeping Beauty. Many women feel this and that’s why in the midst of a pandemic, they are speaking out about a seemingly innocuous advert.
It is a system that values the comfort of one gender over another- Anna Marie Galea
When the Benna Red Velvet advert came out a few weeks ago, I didn’t think much of it other than the concept and the visuals themselves looked like a bad perfume advert from 1986. It was only when someone else brought it up that I realised what had jarred. It’s all very well to say that the whole controversy is just a storm in a milkshake cup: the issue is that what people in general don’t seem to realise is that if you show something enough, then that way of thinking becomes normalised and institutionalised. This is why many women are still not taken seriously when they state that they have been sexually harassed at work. If it’s the norm, then you’re just a whiny cow who can’t take a compliment.
It’s the same premise that leads people to call women witches and whores when they disagree with them. It’s the same premise that has people asking about what victims were wearing when they got raped. Instead of us looking at the reasons why women don’t feel safe, we choose to focus on ways that women can continue to constrict themselves and make themselves smaller, so that boys can continue to be boys and the status quo doesn’t have to change. It is a system that values the comfort of one gender over another to such an extent that people are shamed for speaking out and told that they are being militant and petty.
There is nothing that reflects a society’s values more than an advert, and if you’re happy to tolerate certain things, then perhaps you need to ask yourself why. It’s only through storms in milkshake cups that we can hope to move forward.