Advertising continues to portray women as charming keepers of the home, making it harder to succeed at work. Andrea44/flickr, CC BY-SA

As an Argentinean woman who studies gender in the media, I find it hard to be surprised by Weinstein’s misdeeds. Machismo remains deeply ingrained in Latin American society, yes, but even female political leaders in supposedly gender-equal paradises like Holland and Sweden have told me that they are criticized more in the press and held to a higher standard than their male counterparts.

How could they not be? Across the world, the film and TV industry – Weinstein’s domain – continues to foist outdated gender roles upon viewers.
 

Women’s work

Television commercials are particularly guilty, frequently casting women in subservient domestic roles.

Take this 2015 ad for the Argentine cleaning product Cif, which is still running today. It explains how its concentrated cleaning capsules “made Sleeping Beauty shine.”

The prince could help clean up, but why bother when women can do it all?

In it, a princess eager to receive her prince remembers that – gasp – the floors in her castle tower are a total mess. Thanks to Cif’s magic scouring fluid, she has time not only to clean but also to get dolled up for the prince – who, in case you were wondering, has no physical challenges preventing him from helping her tidy up.

But why should he, when it’s a woman’s job to be both housekeeper and pretty princess?

Somewhat paradoxically, advertisements may also cast men as domestic superheroes. Often, characters like Mr. Muscle will mansplain to women about the best product and how to use it – though they don’t actually do any cleaning themselves.

Mansplaining domestic chores.

More recently, there’s been a shift – perhaps an awkward attempt at political correctness – in which women are still the masters of the home, but their partners are shown “helping out” with the chores. In exchange, the men earn sex object status.

Thanks for ‘helping out,’ hubby.

We’ve come a little way, baby

Various studies on gender stereotypes in commercials indicate that although the advertising industry is slowly changing for the better, marketing continues to target specific products to certain customers based on traditional gender roles.

Women are pitched hygiene and cleaning products, whereas men get ads for banks, credit cards, housing, cars and other significant financial investments.

This year, U.N. Women teamed up with Unilever and other industry leaders like Facebook, Google, Mars and Microsoft to launch the Unstereotype Alliance. The aim of this global campaign is to end stereotypical and sexist portrayals of gender in advertising.

As part of the #Unstereotype campaign, Unilever also undertook research on gender in advertising. It found that only 3 percent of advertising shows women as leaders and just 2 percent conveys them as intelligent. In ads, women come off as interesting people just 1 percent of the time.
 

Britain paves a path

Even before it was forced to reckon with allegations that Harvey Weinstein had also harassed women in London, the United Kingdom was making political progress on the issue of women’s portrayal in the media.

In July, the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority announced that the U.K. will soon prohibit commercials that promote gender stereotypes.

“While advertising is only one of many factors that contribute to unequal gender outcomes,” its press release stated, “tougher advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole.”

As of 2018, the agency says, advertisements in which women are shown as solely responsible for household cleaning or men appear useless around kitchen appliances and unable to handle taking care of their children and dependents will not pass muster in the U.K. Commercials that differentiate between girls’ and boys’ toys based on gender stereotypes will be banned as well.
 

Sticky floors

The U.K.‘s move is a heartening public recognition that gender stereotypes in the media both reflect and further the very real inequalities women face at home and at work.

Worldwide, the International Labor Organization reports, women still bear the burden of household chores and caretaking responsibilities, which often either excludes them from pay work or leaves them relegated to ill-paid part-time jobs.

In the U.K., men spend on average 16 hours per week on domestic tasks, while women spend 26. The European Union average is worse, with women dedicating an average of 26 weekly hours to men’s nine hours on caretaking and household tasks.

In Argentina, my home country, fully 40 percent of men report doing no household work at all, even if they’re unemployed. Among those who do pitch in, it’s 24 hours a week on caretaking and domestic chores for men. Argentinean women put in 45 hours.

You can do the math: On average, Argentinean women use up two days of their week and some 100 days annually – nearly one-third of their year – on unpaid household labor.
 

Real-world consequences

These inequalities, combined with advertising that reinforces them, generate what’s called the “sticky floors” problem. Women – whether would-be investment bankers or, I dare say, aspiring Hollywood stars – don’t just face glass ceilings to advancement, they also are also “stuck” to domestic life by endless chores.

The cultural powers that be produce content that represents private spaces as “naturally” imbued with female qualities, gluing women to traditional caregiving roles.

This hampers their professional development and helps keep them at the bottom of the economy pyramid because women must pull off a balancing act between their jobs inside and outside of the domestic sphere. And they must excel at both, all while competing against male colleagues who likely confront no such challenges.

Former U.S. president Barack Obama once pointed out this double standard in homage to his then-competitor Hillary Clinton. She, he reminded an audience in 2008, “was doing everything I was doing, but just like Ginger Rogers, it was backwards in heels.”

The sticky floor problem puts women in a position to be exploited by men like Weinstein, who tout their ability to help female aspirants to get unstuck. Until society – and, with it, the media we create – comprehend that neither professional success nor domesticity has a gender, these pernicious powerful dynamics will endure.
 

Virginia García Beaudoux, Professor of Political Communication and Public Opinion, University of Buenos Aires

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post How media sexism demeans women and fuels abuse by men like Weinstein appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Mauricio Macri supporters in Argentina. Magalí Iglesias/Flickr. Some rights reserved.

A new right is emerging in several parts of the world. In Latin America, it has a profile of its own and a new, unprecedented social base. If we are to oppose it, we must know it, shun simplistic judgments and understand the differences with the old right.

Argentina’s Mauricio Macri is quite unlike Carlos Menem. The latter introduced neo-liberalism, but he was very much the son of the old political class, and showed some respect for the law and institutional rules. Macri is the son of the neoliberal model and he behaves according to the extractive paradigm, for which spoil is the main argument. He does not hesitate to bypass the values of democracy and its procedures.

Something similar can be said of the Venezuelan right: the name of the game is to achieve results regardless of the means. The operating mode of the new Brazilian right differs even from Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s privatising government. Today, the referents are the likes of Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, or of militaristic, warlike Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who respects neither the Kurds nor the legal opposition, the premises and meetings of which are systematically attacked.

This new right relates to Washington, but it is of little use to think that it acts mechanically, following orders coming from an imperial centre. The regional right, especially in the larger countries, enjoys some flight autonomy in defending its own interests, especially if backed by a more or less developed local business sector.

But what is really new is the broad mass support it gathers. As has been rightly pointed out, never before in Argentina had the right reached the Casa Rosada through elections. This novelty requires some explaining which cannot fit into such a short space as this article. Nor does it seem appropriate to attribute all the right’s progress to the media. What reasons are there to argue that rightwing voters are being manipulated while leftwing voters are conscious and lucid?

There are two issues that need to be cleared before entering a broader analysis. First, the new right’s way of doing things, its authoritarianism without an argument, almost unbridled. Second, the reasons for the new right’s mass support, which includes not only the middle classes, but also a part of the popular sectors.

On Macri’s authoritarian decisions, writer Martín Rodríguez maintains that Macrism acts like the Islamic State: its power grab represents a profanation of the sacred temples of Kirchnerism. The mass layoffs which have been decreed are based on the firm belief that middle-class public servants are privileged people who get paid for doing no work. The political cost of such a mighty decision has been so far very low.

The comparison with the ways of the Islamic State may seem exaggerated, but it does have a point of contact with reality: the new right comes razing, wiping out everything that gets in its way, from workers’ acquired rights to institutional rules. To its thinking, to be democratic is to just count the ballots every four or five years.

The second issue is to understand the mass support for the new right. Anthropologist Andrés Ruggeri emphasizes that the right has been able to build a reactionary social base that can be mobilized, grounded on the most reactionary sectors of the middle class, which are sectors that have always been there and which supported the military dictatorship in the 70s. This social base is composed of voter-consumers who buy their vote as a supermarket product.

The new right considers that the greatest mistake of Cristina Fernández’s government was, instead of fostering an organized popular subject, to have promoted a dismembered, individualistic and consumerist society, which came to think that the gains of the 2001 struggle, and the social benefits obtained during its 12 years in office, were acquired rights which were not at risk. Convincing the voters that this was so, was undoubtedly the great achievement of the right’s campaign, key to its victory at the polls.

Today, the middle classes are very different from those in the 60s. They are no longer composed of graduates from state universities, who actually read books and kept on studying after finishing their academic training, whose aim was to get to work for medium salaries in state agencies, and who socialized in public spaces where they came together with the popular sectors. The new middle classes’ referent is the very rich, they set their sights on living in gated communities, far from the popular classes and the urban fabric, and are deeply consumerist and suspicious of free thought.

A decade ago, a part of these middle classes used to bang pots against Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo’s corralito, and occasionally joined the unemployed (picket and pan, the struggle is one, was the motto in 2001). Today, they are only concerned with ownership and security, and they believe that freedom consists in buying dollars and staying at five-star hotels for their holidays.

These middle classes (and a part of the popular sectors) are culturally modeled by extractivism – that is, by the consumerist values promoted by financial capital, so far removed from the values of work and effort that industrial society was promoting just four decades ago.

The proponents of the neoliberal model get a floor of support of around 35-40 percent of the voters, as shown by all the electoral processes in the region. We often do not know how to deal with this new right. It will certainly not be defeated through agitation against imperialism, but by showing that life can be enjoyed without falling into consumerism, debt and individualism.

This article was first published on Open Democracy

Raúl Zibechi is a Uruguayan radio and print journalist, writer, militant and political theorist. He contributes to the weekly newspaper Brecha.

The post The social foundations of the Latin American new right appeared first on SabrangIndia.