Legitimizing Sexist Advertising: A Critical Focus on the Danish Consumer Ombudsman’s Guidelines and Adjudications of Complaints of Gender Discrimination

ABSTRACT

Feminist media studies have highlighted gender discrimination in advertising since the 1960s. Despite this focus and political attention on combating sexist stereotypes and prejudicial portrayals in advertising the problem persists. Few scholarly endeavours have thus far probed how the national agencies tasked with preventing sexism perceive and address such representations in marketing. To remedy this research gap this study investigates the Danish Consumer Ombudsman’s (DCO) definition of sexism and its evaluation of stereotypical representations of gender in marketing campaigns by Danish companies. The DCO is empowered to ensure non-discriminatory representations in advertising. Utilizing feminist critical discourse analysis as a theory and methodology the present study addresses two aspects of the institutional and discursive practices of this authoritative body, scrutinizing its latest Guidelines on gender-related advertising of 1 April 2012 and examining its application of these guidelines in adjudications of complaints against sexism. Applying the lens of post-feminism and sexism to the analysis, the article indicates how the DCO legitimizes and normalizes sexist advertising and offers significant insights into practices that perpetuate inequality in the media and its regulatory institutions. Ultimately, the article reveals how the very societal institutions established to safeguard gender equality reproduce gender discrimination.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender representation
• advertising
• sexism
• regulation
• media institutions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maja Rudloff

Maja Rudloff holds a PhD in Media Studies and an MA in Art History. She currently works as a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has a particular interest in visual, discursive and political dimensions of gender representation in the media. Among her publications are “(Post)feminist paradoxes: the sensibilities of gender representation in Disney’s Frozen”, “’Women are from Venus and men play Oddset’: constructions of masculinity in responses to complaints of sexism against women in Danish TV commercials” and a recent entry on “Advertising Masculinity” in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication.