Shane Rockenstein Carlson
Professor Harris
INT 36BH
1 September 2020
The Gendered Rhetoric of Infomercials
How many times have you been watching your favorite TV show when you are suddenly bombarded with a slew of infomercials? I know this does not happen nearly as often anymore, what with the rise of streaming, but think back to when you were a kid, watching Spongebob or the Fairly Oddparents, and those dreaded commercial breaks would rear their ugly heads. Other than being annoyed at the interruption to your regularly-scheduled programming, how did the commercials for the Snuggie or the Shake Weight make you feel? Did you notice any similarities in the way these commercials were made?
Obviously, there are basic similarities. They always have to establish some problem that the product solves, make demonstrations of its uses, have some testimonials from some very real “satisfied customers”. However, there are some striking rhetorical issues consistently found amongst almost all these commercials. There are specific gender politics and gendered imagery used in these commercials to sell their products more easily. To be precise, there is a clear objective to make every commercial product more masculine, even hyper-masculine to the point of self-parody in some cases, to make it more palatable to a wider audience.
I have chosen six of some of the most famous infomercials to analyze. All of them will likely be familiar, though some more than others. YouTube uploads of all these ads will be made available in the Appendix.
The first ad we will analyze is one that I’m sure many know and love: OxiClean. Everyone knows who Billy Mays was and has seen at least one of his infomercials. This one in particular is probably his most famous. The commercial is actually quite basic in its structure. It simply follows several demonstrations of OxiClean in different scenarios, like removing pet stains from clothes, comparing it to bleach on jeans, and cleaning baby clothes and stuffed toys. There is nothing too “out-there” with this commercial.
Nonetheless, what can be observed from it is the masculinization of a conventionally feminine activity. Cleaning is generally seen as something mostly women do, and this phenomenon in modern history goes back to extremely patriarchal stereotypes from the 1950s and before, where women would stay at home and men would go to their 9-to-5 jobs. This is inherently sexist, but it is a real occurrence. Therefore, it is interesting to see a male spokesperson advertising this cleaning product. Further, the quick pace of the ad gives a more masculine energy than if it were to spend a lot of time going through demonstrations and explanations. Maybe this has to do with that idea that women spend all their time cleaning. This product seems to get cleaning done so quickly that even men can do it!
Another fast-paced commercial that tries to masculinize a stereotypically female activity (and one of my favorite infomercials ever) is the Slap Chop. Like the OxiClean ad, this one basically boils down to a series of demonstrations, though there are a few testimonials at the end. What makes this ad stand out from OxiClean is Vince Offer, the Slap Chop’s spokesman. Whereas Billy Mays is more friendly and inviting, Vince Offer is kind of a jerk. Putting aside his controversial legal history (he was arrested for beating up an escort in 2009, one year after the Slap Chop made its debut), there is an aggressive energy to this ad. This isn’t just due to its abrupt pace from one demonstration to the next, but it’s also from Vince’s personality. He keeps making little quips like the infamous “Stop having a boring tuna; stop having a boring life,” or his berating his watchers for not having salad in their diets. It’s his overt macho-ness that turns cooking, again a conventionally feminine activity (although that is luckily changing), into a fast, fun activity that men are allowed to enjoy.
Both of these ads we’ve looked at so far attempt to make conservatively female-led activities more masculine through their use of a male spokesperson. Advertising the product with a man using it makes men who watch it feel like they can use the product with no issues. It begins to move past the issue of seeing activities like cooking and cleaning as women’s jobs and not men’s jobs as well.
Let’s take a look at a bit of a different strategy. The Ginsu Knives’ commercial first debuted in 1980, and it’s famous for featuring a guy chopping a tomato with his hand and a knife going through a tin can. Again, it is essentially a series of demonstrations of the product, but there’s something new that sets it apart. There’s a lot to unpack about the harmful consequences of orientalism and cultural appropriation in this setting, especially since the Ginsu Knives aren’t made by a Japanese company. Rather, they are made by the Scott Fetzer Company, located in Ohio, and they weren’t even originally called Ginsu but renamed, according to the obituary of Berry Becher, one of the founders of the Ginsu Knife, “with [the] hope of evoking samurai swords” (Hevesi). Through adopting a name that invokes Japanese warriors and heavily leaning on that imagery in the ad, the company makes the Ginsu Knives stand out from other knives and more appealing to men who are interested in or like swords, martial arts, or Japanese culture.
Again, the use of Japanese stereotypes is extremely problematic, especially when you include the fact that Ginsu “has no meaning in Japanese,” (Hevesi). The near fetishization of Japanese culture that this product perpetuates is harmful in a multitude of ways, and its deceitful marketing is only one of them.
One more noticeable thing with regards to the Ginsu is the fact that, even though there is no spokesperson, there is still a male voice telling us about the product in the form of a voiceover narration. There is still a man using the knife, but we don’t get to see Billy Mays or Vince Offer both use the knife and talk about how great it is. So why did they still feel the need to have a male voice? Well, that comes down to a standard in media that is extremely sexist but seen everywhere. Generally, people hear a male voice as rational a female voice as emotional. This is why you see documentaries with David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman, both men, as narrators. Sure, they have great voices, but the decision to have a man provide the narration in the first place is based on how people perceive a male voice. A poll from Harris Interactive, a market research company, found that over a quarter of those asked said they were more likely to buy a car from a man’s voice than a woman’s and that a little under a quarter said they were more likely to buy a computer from a man’s voice than a woman’s. We perceive male voices as more forceful and knowledgeable than female voices, and as such, we are more likely to believe the narrator of the Ginsu Knife commercial when he tells us how great the Ginsu Knife is.
I think it’s time we got to the most famous recent commercial: Flex Tape. For those few who might be unaware of this ad that has been memed to death by the Internet, I’ll summarize. This commercial has a slew of demonstrations, ranging from normal to absolutely insane. The focal point is probably the ending, in which Phil Swift, spokesman and one of the Swift Response company’s founders, saws a boat in half and repairs it “using only Flex Tape!” But even without that big climax, the commercial is drenched in machismo. I was surprised to find that there are three shots in the first thirty seconds of someone slapping Flex Tape over a large leak, and all the shots are framed exactly the same way! There’s a clear masculine energy in the entire commercial, from these shots of tape-slapping, to Phil Swift lifting a 45 pound disc with a strip of Flex Tape, to men repairing RVs and boats and cars and roofs, to that wonderfully absurd finale. Already, this kind of tape is something you would find at a Home Depot or Lowe’s, the kind of store that caters toward conventionally male activities of big physical repairs and projects.
So why does this ad have to indulge so much in hyper-masculinity? Maybe for the exact reason we’re talking about it. It’s so well known because of how absurd it is. As we’ve seen following the ad’s explosion into meme-dom, the company is self-aware of the meme and grateful for the attention. By being so overtly masculine and almost self-parody, it sticks in the viewer’s brain the way a completely candid ad never would.
So far we’ve looked at commercials for housework products, whether that be cooking utensils, cleaning solutions, or tape. But what do we see when we look at recreational activities?
The Tony Little Gazelle infomercials make me uncomfortable. The Gazelle Glider is a workout bike from Tony Little, who bills himself as “America’s Personal Trainer” on the Gazelle Glider’s website. I could not find the infomercials in their entirety (nor did I want to), but I found a compilation on YouTube of some of the best moments. From what I can tell, the infomercials follow Tony Little in a room with people using the Gazelle. He shows off the bike to his viewers and to Darla Haun, and I do not know if she is his girlfriend, his friend, his business partner, or what.
What I do know is that the two of them together make me uncomfortable. There is so much sexual tension and imagery rampant in these infomercials. At one point, Darla is using the bike, then Tony steps on behind her so they can both use it together. It just looks like two people in workout clothes dry-humping each other. The cameras love to ogle the women using the bikes, including Darla after Tony has her take her jacket off. There are men using the bikes in the background as well, but the cameras clearly prefer the women.
Another workout product commercial with a hilarious amount of sexual imagery is the infamous ThighMaster. The commercial shows mostly women using the ThighMaster, as the cameras zoom in on their legs pumping together to squeeze the ThighMaster. There is one man shown using it, but he’s simply doing bicep curls with it, nothing nearly as provoking as what the women are doing.
Both of these have an evident emphasis on a sexual angle, and there’s one clear conclusion as to why. The cameras ogling the women will keep straight men’s attention and maybe get them to buy the product. It’s a marketing tactic summed up in just two words: sex sells.
However, another observation we can assess from these two ads is that they will hold women’s attention, too. Plenty of women might want to look the way the women in the ads do and conclude that the Gazelle Glider or the ThighMaster is what they need to look that way. Plus, the few men in these ads might attract straight women. Nonetheless, the imagery is definitely geared toward men, with the ogling of the women and the Gazelle’s male spokesperson.
The similar observations in all these ads point toward a clear trend of masculinization in marketing these kinds of products. Almost every single one had a male spokesperson and employed masculine, “badass” imagery to appeal to men. Often, this widens the possible market, as many of the products in the ads belong in stereotypically feminine markets, like cooking and cleaning. Sometimes, in the case of Flex Tape, there is an overindulgence to make the product stand out. And there is plenty of sexual imagery used to appeal to mostly straight men (but also other orientations and genders).
And most of these strategies have been successful. The Scott Fetzer Company, creators of the Ginsu Knife, makes $407 million annually. The Church & Dwight Company, owners of OxiClean, made $616 million in 2019 and list OxiClean as one of the 12 brands powering their growth. In 2014, CNBC published an article valuing the ThighMaster at $100 million in sales.
However, the one of the products we’ve looked at that has not been nearly as successful is Flex Tape. Swift Response has reported an annual income of $3.02 million. Not bad, but it’s questionable when compared to the top duct tape brands. The latest stats I could find were from 2016, in which Duck Tape sold $58.6 million, Gorilla Tape sold $16.7 million, and Scotch Tape sold a whopping $219 million (that does not count the different off-shoots of Scotch Tape, like Scotch Magic, Scotch Blue, and Scotch Expressions).
There’s a balance to be struck, it seems. The most successful infomercials utilize just enough masculine imagery to pull in a wide audience, while those that overdo it have a niche audience and are more well-known for ridicule than sales. No matter what, there is a clear trend to enlarge a product’s target audience by catering toward males in commercials. It works for marketing, but whether it’s right and honest is another question entirely. So keep an eye out the next time you spot an infomercial. Perhaps you’ll find some startling similarities to others in terms of their use of gendered imagery.
Appendix
Works Cited
Church & Dwight Co., Inc. “Church & Dwight Co., Inc. Annual Report 2019.” 2020, www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReports/PDF/NYSE_CHD_2019.pdf. Accessed Aug. 2020.
Harris Interactive. “The Harris Poll: Are Consumers More Responsive to Male or Female Voices in Advertisements?” March 12, 2010, https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-Media-Advertising-2010-03.pdf. Accessed Aug. 2020.
Hevesi, Dennis. “Barry Becher, a Creator of Ginsu Knife Commercials,Dies at 71.” The New York Times, June 30, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/media/barry-becher-a-creator-of-ginsu-knife-commercials-dies-at-71.html. Accessed Aug. 2020.
“Leading U.S. Household Tape Brands 2016 | Statista.” Statista, Statista, 2016, www.statista.com/statistics/193889/leading-us-household-tape-brands-in-2013-based-on-sales/. Accessed 27 Aug. 2020.
“Swift Response, LLC Company Profile: Weston, FL: Competitors, Financials & Contacts – Dun & Bradstreet.” Company Profile | Weston, FL | Competitors, Financials & Contacts – Dun & Bradstreet, 2020, https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.swift_response_llc.a52c77475932d388a8afff3237eba11d.html. Accessed Aug. 2020.
“The Scott Fetzer Company Company Profile: Westlake, OH: Competitors, Financials & Contacts – Dun & Bradstreet.” Company Profile | Westlake, OH | Competitors, Financials & Contacts – Dun & Bradstreet, 2020, www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.the_scott_fetzer_company.d8a000d2b148aaa846e94d42fee18fa0.html. Accessed Aug. 2020.
Wright, Erica. “Inside the ‘ThighMaster Mansion.’” CNBC, June 13, 2014, https://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/13/inside-the-thighmaster-mansion.html. Accessed Aug. 2020.
