Open AccessWhat a Man Wants, What a Man Needs: Markers of Masculinity in Print Advertising
Author(s) -
Lars M. Blöhdorn,
Sabrina Meyn-Kruse,
Nadja Linke
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
linguaculture
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2285-9403
pISSN - 2067-9696
DOI - 10.47743/lincu-2021-1-0192
Subject(s) - masculinity , construct (python library) , audience measurement , advertising , perspective (graphical) , appeal , product (mathematics) , psychology , social psychology , sociology , gender studies , political science , computer science , geometry , mathematics , artificial intelligence , law , business , programming language
Which advertisements appeal to a male readership? What are the underlying strategies used to target men? With the help of a corpus of adjectives derived from the men's magazine GQ, this study seeks to analyze how masculinity is constructed in print advertising. In doing so, it approaches the phenomenon of 'male language' from a sociolinguistic perspective focused on gender and employs quantitative as well as qualitative evaluation methods to reveal that current advertising campaigns construct 'male lifestyles' around products by using adjectives that convey simplistic and straight-forward messages, but also go beyond that by taking into account non-linear approaches when targeting a male audience. Finally, a comparison with advertisements in the women's magazine Cosmopolitan highlights the emergence of gender-specific features as well as gender-oriented product groups and reveals categories and concepts that are exclusive to their target genders.