2016. Comedian Vir Das is poised on a traditional swing, his head turned upwards with a look of ecstasy. Tenderly, he squeezes a drop from mango on to his pouting lips – and then the camera zooms out as the director shouts “CUT!”.
“Vir, yaar. It needs to look sexier.”
He agrees, and starts to coo with the music.
The rest of the ad deals with the many tropes of Indian advertising – where women are made to dress skimpily to sell cement, to pose erotically to sell motorcycles or to make the act of consuming mango juice somehow sexual. Ultimately, Vir Das is still selling deodorant, but it’s a marked change from the usual trope of deodorant commercials, such as the one below.
It’s left unclear whether the women depicted do anything other than spin towards the man with the advertised deodorant. But this isn’t a one-off case.
According to a study released by a major multinational conglomerate, half of all ads surveyed worldwide depicted some form of gender stereotyping, with only 2% of advertisements showing women in a role that could be considered ‘intelligent’ (however that is measured).
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to editor@madrascourier.com
