Selling Skin
Part
3: Marketing Against Masculinity
An enigmatic
two-page spread for Nike appeared in the April 2001 issue
of Self. One of several
ads in Nike's "Everyday
Women" campaign, it depicts a lean woman with short, damp
hair, stretching her legs against a tree on a grassy path
in a suburban neighborhood. She is clad in a blue pullover
jacket, black leggings and matching blue sneakers. In tiny
white type across her body appear four words: "I'm not Marion
Jones." Turn the page and there are the words, "I am a runner."
"A lot
of women don't think they're an athlete or a runner. They
don't put those terms on themselves," said Nike's Reith.
"Instead, they say, 'I'm just doing a little something to
get in shape.'"
While
searching various workout clubs, said Reith, Nike representatives
came across the 40-year-old woman the company decided to
feature in the ad. She was with her boyfriend, and "said
off-handedly that she was going to run the L.A.
Marathon. Her boyfriend then said, 'You're not going
to do this,' [but] she's just become a runner and is going
to be in the marathon," Reith said.
Nike
decided she would make an ideal representative of the women
who buy their products. "So maybe you're not somebody who's
going to be a world-class athlete like Marion Jones. But
you should really look at yourself as an athlete, as a runner,"
said Reith of the ad's implied message.
| "So
maybe you're not somebody who's going to be a world-class
athlete like Marion Jones. But you should really look
at yourself as an athlete, as a runner." |
Experts
interpreted the ad in several ways. Hilliard thought it
said something amazing about how people view Marion Jones.
"The fact that they're mentioning Marion Jones means a lot.
It means she's an icon," she said.
Lisa
Sherman, president of the Women's
Sports Network in New York, called it a new marketing
sensation. "I don't know that companies would have put that
kind of money behind that kind of a woman 10 years ago,"
Sherman said. "She's a woman with an incredible, beautiful
body, but not in the traditional sense."
Kevin
J. Matthews gave the company credit for its marketing of
African-American athletes, calling Nike "the first real
company to do this well." Matthews is the co-author of an
annual "Gender and Racial Report Card" produced by the Center
for the Study of Sports in Society.
A lot
of these companies are really targeting African-Americans,
Matthews said. "They might want to say they're 'race neutral,'
but the competition for the black market is so hot. In our
culture, at this moment, a lot of the great athletes are
African-Americans. It's only natural they're going to try
to use African-American athletes."
But
experts like Mary Jo Kane, who directs the Tucker Center
for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University
of Minnesota, said the ad really means that "women athletes
have to distance themselves from feeling powerful and strong.
My question to Nike would be, 'Are you saying you want the
consumer to not identify with star athletes?' Imagine Nike
having a commercial with Michael Jordan, and it said, 'Buy
these shoes so you cannot be like Mike.'" While Nike wanted
male consumers to "directly identify with the athlete,"
the Marion Jones ad veers women away from this kind of identification,
she said.
Women
are seen as "threatening traditional notions of masculinity"
if they become strong and powerful, said Kane. "Right now,
our culture tells us that notions of strength and power
are reserved for males. For women to be powerful and strong
can threaten what it means to be masculine in our culture."
Another
recent Nike ad pictures a hockey player with sweat-soaked,
stringy hair falling out from under her helmet and proclaiming:
"I like pink." The photograph exaggerates the size of her
lower body because it takes up three-quarters of the page.
She looks massive. She's rumpled and sweaty but her eyebrows
are carefully colored in and tweezed to perfection, and
there's mocha-colored eyeliner on her lids. Her lips shimmer
with a light pink lip gloss.
"Everyone
who's in these ads were chosen because they actually do
the sport," said Reith. The "I like pink" statement, she
said, was intentionally juxtaposed with a woman who plays
a sport that is stereotyped as very masculine. The hockey
player in the ad told its creators that pink actually was
her favorite color.
Kane,
on the other hand, said the ad only reinforces gender stereotypes.
"It's impossible to find marketing in which there isn't
some association of female athletes to notions of femininity,"
she said. "Tell me how you watch a woman goalie, and the
one statement that would come out her mouth, as an athlete
is, 'I like pink.'" Marketers want "women to be strong,
but not too strong."
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We're In It Together, Sister >>
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