I've just seen a new Persil advert (it doesn't appear to be available online yet, unfortunately) celebrating the fact that they've been trading in the UK for 100 years. It also celebrates traditional patriarchal gender roles as they have appeared in their adverts over the past few decades.
Not content with this, they also uphold the utterly impossible as a minimum benchmark for women to achieve.
The theme of the advert is "A mum is..." Not "a perfect mum", not even "a good mum". Just "a mum". Implication: if you fall short of this, then you don't qualify as a mum, you're a failed mum. Many of the criteria for "mumhood" that follow are based on finding contradictions: things that to unite them in the same person would be practically to create a multiple personality disorder.
Having only seen the advert once so far, many of the specifics are already fading from my memory, but I think the gender normative role-reinforcement is summed up by what I think was the second or third criterion, and imagery they used to illustrate it. The voiceover said something like, "A mum tells her boys to get back up and get back in there - but secretly dreads when they'll no longer need her comfort." The images reinforced the trope "Boys get/are dirty; women make everything clean afterwards."
I really hope I don't need to point out here just why that's a big problem!
If I see the advert again, I'll probably just turn off the telly in disgust, but if I don't turn off, then I'll make better notes and update this post.
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