ABSTRACT
A growing proportion of 1980s consumer-goods advertisements stressed women’s expanding opportunities for achieving success and parity vis-à-vis men. Ads more and more depicted men and women in relations of formal equity, but on different footing. Secret deodorant, for example, presented itself as strong enough for a man, but made for women. Gender difference was relocated and justified as taking place in nature: women’s perspiration biochemically differs from men’s. Television ads presented women playing and competing with men at men’s games, and winning, while in the end reaffirming their traditional (i.e., natural, ‘god-given’) gender traits – looking attractive. The message: women make active choices, both in competing with men and selecting a scented deodorant that leaves them feminine, pretty and fashionably stylish. Redressing the power imbalance in gender relations was invariably cast in terms of commodity consumption and personal appearance: change occurs not through politics, or strikes, or challenges to the legal system, but through individuated commodity consumption.
