ASA bans sexist ads in The Manifesto

Bennet’s catchy pop tune “mum has gone to Iceland” may be a historic lament if the ASA’s new rules kick in… The Advertising Standards Authority will no longer allow sexual stereotypes in advertising - rather like the way they banned macho drinking a while back.

So instead of having a whole family creating mess, the dad being totally useless and the mum rolling her eyes and then cleaning it up single handedly, the whole family would need to do it.

Now interestingly women still on average do 10 more hours a week of domestic drudgery (cleaning, childcare, laundry etc) than men. And despite the fact that I genuinely think it is both our responsibility to keep the house sanitary, and the fact that we have a Cleaning Fairy who is nothing less than magical, I still do the lion’s share of the leftovers because AgentX doesn’t even notice this stuff needs doing, whereas I do anticipate what needs doing AND I do something about it!!!

My mil and my mum will pointedly ask me “do you think the bins need to go out?” Or “what a mess - does your mummy never clean?” directed passively aggressively via the children (well no, no I don’t - I spend all my available cleaning time just tidying up the mess which everyone else leaves!). Culturally we still expect the woman to keep house.

(And in this particular rant I’m not even going to go into the mental load and where that falls....we all know that women do the vast majority of this too!)

Anyway - because those people in advertising are very very clever, they’ve figured out a way to get round the ruling and prove that their sexist adverts are most effective: from now on they will be shooting not one but 2 adverts, identical scripts but with the genders switched. And then they will monitor sales resulting from the campaigns to prove that mum’s do indeed do the shopping and are gatekeepers to the family finances and they like and respond to the sexist advertising … But the as agency win twice because they’ve had 2 lots of production approved by the client. Smart cookies these advertising people!

It will be interesting to see if the ASA uphold this ruling in the face of commercial realism - they certainly have with the drinking rule about no macho activities. I’ve had adverts knocked back because we were slightly taking the piss out of it by having the drink company film non macho pursuits like knitting and flower arrangement - with the undertone that drinking a can of SomethingDrink would let you not do these boring things -got denied because of “subliminally linking alcohol with macho activity to the brand”. And yet they allow sports sponsorship to be featured and loads of whisky adverts to be shot in wild Scottish Highlands subliminally linking with hunting/fishing/shooting pursuits.

It will be interesting to see the changes and cultural shift away from “well all men are hopeless at housework and I have to do everything” and whether that makes any difference in reality.