ABSTRACT
Pop feminist criticism of advertising mounted throughout the 1980s, and by the late 1980s, many advertisers were bidding to reincorporate the cultural power of feminism, while domesticating its critique of sexist mass media. To stay competitive in the hunt for market share, advertisers adapted to female consumers who had grown hostile to how advertisements continuously positioned them to envy the body or the look conveyed by model images. Contemporary women have been so inundated by photographs of beautiful women that they often react to the images with feelings of anger. Ad campaigns in the latter 1980s like that for Pantene acknowledged the problem of women competing with each other in terms of image. The caption ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’ aimed at appeasing women’s anger about being addressed in terms of unattainable images of glamour. Responding to women’s resistance to being framed as objects of desire, advertisers devised aesthetic responses to the male gaze and the customary mode of address. Advertisers also pursued a wide range of superficial ideological grafts that spliced together signifiers of feminism with the consumer narrative of femininity as envy, desire and power.
