Portrayal of Women through Perfume and Colonge Ads

This perfume advertisement from the November 1964 edition of the men’s magazine Esquire portrays woman critically as indecisive and concerned with petty considerations such as hair and dress, but also controlling of their husbands and home-life. “Woman have changed their hairdos, eyelashes...husbands and their ideas about life in general.” Meant to appeal to a male demographic the ad works but it does not correctly illustrate women’s rights. Women may have the ability to change their opinions but they did not have the ability to change the result of their ideas. As put forth by Casey Hayden and Mary King in “Sex and Caste: A kind of Memo” written in 1965, “It [our society] is a caste system which, at its worst, uses and exploits women. This is complicated by several facts, among them: (1) The caste system is not institutionalized by law (women have the right to vote, to sue for divorce, etc.)...” Hayden and King focused on the difficulty experienced by women to change the system, because the system by law allowed them equal rights but it was not instituted as such. Most men did not recognize the discrepancy at the time, even those advocating civil rights.
By the time the second ad, from the July 1982 edition Life magazine, was published women’s rights had been given attention and furthered, both by society and ironically so by the law when the Civil Rights Act of July 1964 actually began to be implemented. Senator Howard Smith had tried to defeat the bill through inclusion of women’s rights, but it was passed anyway. In the Revlon men’s cologne ad, the female is portrayed as a vixen. The male, a “Scoundrel”, the cologne’s name, should “Seize the moment.” Both genders are here represented as daring and progressive, they are described in more equal in terms. But the stigma still remains that the woman is being promiscuous while the man is just being a man. Inequality still remains but the difference between the 1964 ad and the 1982 ad is that women are obviously more progressive, and are allowed to be so.

Image 1.Esquire Magazine, November 1964 edition, Perfume.
Image 2.Life Magazine, May 1982 edition, Cologne.
Ps. For some reason I'm still unable to get the links to upload and work, but clicking on the images enlarges them.