Women Androids, Models or Sex Objects: The Portrayals of Bulgarian Women in Advertising from 1945 to

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Women Androids, Models or Sex ObjectsThe
Portrayals of Bulgarian Women in Advertising from
1945 to the Present

• Dr. Elza Ibroscheva
• Assistant Professor
• Department of Mass Communications
• Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
• eibrosc_at_siue.edu

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Why Study Images of EE Women?

• Analysis of female images and portraits as found
  in the mass media today gives us ample
  opportunity to form an opinion on the nature of
  changes at work in Eastern European media and,
  what is more, in society as a whole.
• It would not be an exaggeration to say that
  women's characters may provide a crucial clue to
  contradictions inherent in present-day reforms,
  which are often so elusive and hard to identify.

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Communism and Images of Women

• Communism kept traditional patriarchy intact,
  with women shouldering the burden of economic and
  domestic labor
• Double exploitation of women--as domestic workers
  and producers
• Yet, sexuality was virtually absent from the
  image of the Soviet woman
• Two images the woman-revolutionary, inherited
  from the earlier Bolshevik Press, (the images
  that very soon turned into idols), and a new
  image of the woman-enthusiast, the builder of a
  new society.
• Also, "Woman-Worker", and "Peasant-Woman".

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• A worker and a political functionary?

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Who Was the Soviet Woman?

• A typical woman of the Stalin period was
  completely devoid of any playfulness or coquetry,
  which were declared to be harmful bourgeois
  influences, let alone sexuality.
• Of all feminine manifestations, only motherly
  love in moderate quantities was tolerated women
  actively mastered men's skills

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Socialism, Gender and Advertising

• Non commercial and non political advertising was
  predominantly oriented towards women
• Construed both as housewives and consumers, women
  were ascribed the leading role in the production
  of aesthetics value and social meaning
• The discourse or advertising was generally
  non-gendered, and when femininity was stressed,
  it was always in promoting femininity which is
  wholesome, functional and non-indulging often
  the result of make it yourself fashion and
  style

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• Fifty years ago, the image of Russian women
  celebrated by the Soviet state was the heroine
  mother-worker. If you look at Soviet Socialist
  realist sculptures, you see women with muscular
  arms holding sheaths of wheat or a hammer and
  sickle while also suckling an infant. That
  stereotype was beneficial to the Soviet state.
  Now the Soviet Union is gone, and a new
  stereotype of the hyper feminine woman has
  emerged.
• Victoria Gamburg
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The Sexing Up of Bulgarian Women

• Today, advertising is a multi-million dollar
  business
• Sex sells everything--from latex paint to
  Christmas cards
• Westernizing ones look also means sexualizing
  it, which is also seen as a measure of social and
  economic success
• Aesthetic cultivation of the body in response to
  the idea of the Soviet self-sacrificing woman
• Post-communist changes in appearance for women
  are also closely tied to the penetration of
  global capitalism into the region

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The dilemma of the gender transition

• Could anyone that at least once opened a fashion
  journal issued in Prague in the 1970s filled with
  sex-less figures wrapped in colorless fabric
  seriously mobilize against abuse of women's
  bodies in the fashion industry and advertising?
• Jirina Smejkalova, 1996

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The Sexing Up of Bulgarian Women

• Advertising also constructs a very deliberate
  image of the Bulgarian woman
• Promotes a new feminine mystique stressing
  beauty as its most paramount goal
• The erotic body becomes a commodity
• Readily embraced by most women as a means of
  transforming oneself from a self-sacrificing
  women, but also manipulated for commercial gain
  and for pushing further the culture of
  hypersexual consumerism

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Conclusion

• Advertising, as a cultural pedagogy, has become a
  leading forum for defining gender identities in
  the post-Soviet transition
• The Soviet woman is no longer an asexual,
  mechanical Android
• On contrary, she has adapted a hyper-sexual image
  which fundamentally transforms both her social
  worth and her self-esteem
• This hypersexuallty in turn becomes the new
  myth of the transition and misconstrued sense
  of liberation