Role call
Here's something we could use more of: a clear-eyed, dispassionate critique of what Chinese television is feeding its audience. For last month's Women's Day, a media-analysis group selected 10 adverts for censure because of how they portrayed gender roles, and 10 adverts worth commending. It was a useful call to wake up and notice the gender biases on display.
The adverts were selected by the Beijing-based Capital Women's Media Monitoring Network, and released at a press conference. They showed a wide range of advertising styles - from primitive ads where a man yells a phone number six times in a row, to subtle confections designed to slip directly into the subconsciousness. It's these more sophisticated advertisements that want monitoring. The danger of ingrained gender bias is that there's no conscious realisation, no awareness - it takes a gentle nudge or even a light slap to take notice.
Just watching all the ads together was enough to make the point. The 10 stereotyped spots were much more entertaining, in the same way that a bloody car wreck on the evening news tends to increase viewership. Pretty girls pout helplessly in front of their crashed computers, imploring male co-workers to come to their rescue. A child films his mother making dinner for him, then awards her a gold medal. She turns to the camera and says: 'Be a gold-medal mother', as we cringe and grind our molars. A shampoo ad, presumably aimed at a female market, shows a naked woman writhing under the suds, presumably in pleasure: will that appeal to the target audience?
Particularly dismaying are the advertisements that purport to depict China's wealthy, modernised future. Nearly all show women as part of that future's scenery, on a level with leather upholstery. They are objects of male connoisseurship, to be judged and savoured like a fine brandy. Chinese men are striding into a new, luxurious future, where supermodels apparently await them.
The 10 commendable adverts mostly depict women handling technology without breaking it, or giving male colleagues a run for their money in the workplace. Men cook, women drive (a smart move given the growing proportion of female drivers), and tiresome domestic archetypes are turned on their head.
But all this is of little use unless it's included in the mainstream press, carrying its message to a wider audience. This is the 10th year that the network has conducted its survey, and it is starting to get noticed. The reaction has been predictable: mostly indignant protests from companies that advertise.
The organisers are aware that their campaign to influence public awareness will be long and arduous.
