Advertisements have, for a long time, been informing and influencing our way of viewing the world and our politics of perception. In post-liberalised India, advertisements have been used not only for promoting products but also as a way of transferring generic ideas that conform to largely-accepted notions. These ads often also become a way of challenging and transforming conventional notions on family, marriage, sexuality, femininity and masculinity. Using the concepts of gender equality and empowerment as a marketing tool, they sell a host of products.

In contemporary times, this has become an important branding trend in India. However, with recent history and social movements challenging normative beliefs, popular visual culture has been revisited to try and bring the oppressed out of the margins. Since most of these forms are common modes of consumption, deeply entrenched ideas have been destabilised enough to begin a conversation about the socio-political changes that discomfit us.

However, most such advertisements, while assigning the titular role to women and professing a certain desire to celebrate them through a specific kind of product placement, turn out to be situating them within traditionally-defined, regressive roles which would further perpetuate gender stereotypes. Disturbingly, these advertisements employ and appropriate popular feminist ideas of equality and empowerment while normalising a set of ideals that are a complete antithesis to feminist ethos.

One such recent advertisement that particularly misleads us with a standardised idea of acknowledging – and then promptly negating women from the narrative – is that for mosquito repellent brand All Out, owned by SC Johnson (SCJ), an American conglomerate.

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SCJ is a family-owned enterprise, a compelling fact mirrored in an exact setting in said advertisement where a Rockwellian-family is seen participating in the age-old ritual of eating a meal together. The ad, created by acclaimed filmmaker Shoojit Sircar, showcases a woman serving food to a large family. Her young son is sulking and refuses to partake of the food served to him. Wordlessly, she takes the plate away from him, leading to an implosion from the rest of the family, including her mother-in-law and husband who chastise her for rebuking her son for ‘stealing’ Rs 10 from her purse.

The woman, who remains quiet throughout, is only ‘rescued’ by the intervention of an elderly patriarch, who without reprimanding any of the methods employed to address the issue, only supports the mother for being a strict parent and doing what apparently takes great courage: censuring one’s child.

Apart from the gaping disconnect of linking the idea with the product itself (whether her assumed disciplining also has nuances of protecting the child against all hindrances – moral and physical), the ad campaign negates the woman from the space entirely. Whilst she is physically present, she seems to have no autonomy, no selfhood or even language to call her own. Even an act of assertiveness, that of scolding her child, is only relayed through other people and acts as a conduit for her only possible identity, that of a mother. Her fully realised self, along with her power of speech, seems to be entirely missing.

The advertisement carries the message of supporting “tough” mothers, urging the viewer to legitimise women who resort to a certain kind of discipline to protect/guide their children. The violence and abuse that the ‘tough mother’ is subjected to is normalised. The setting of the scene also reduces her to a submissive, subservient role where it’s only the younger women in the family (one can assume that they are the daughters-in-law) who seem to be serving the meal rather than partaking of it with the others.

Previous generations almost always saw this kind of sexism as a core part of conventional families. To exhibit and showcase this very trait as the norm without critiquing it is problematic. This can be seen as a regressive family unit where women are perceived as primary caregivers. They are burdened with creating a sense of belonging for patriarchy to re-assert itself through insidious yet effective means. The only other woman in the ad given a sense of an identity is the woman’s mother-in-law – but that too is layered with archetypes which reduces her to a caricatured cliché.

Her castigation of her daughter-in-law is ridden with abusive stereotypes which seem grossly exaggerated and unfair given the scope of her apparent flaws in parenting. Even the final denouement of the narrative, that of the venerable old man stepping in to give an exposition of how authoritarian motherhood needs all the support that it can get in order to raise morally evolved children, lessens the subjectivity of the woman in question as a docile object, whose only role is that of a glorified incubator and being primarily used for supporting discourses in maternity and motherhood.

Comments by other family members regarding the mother’s family background, her husband’s unabashed declaration that it is ‘his’ money that was taken and not ‘her father’s’ get completely brushed aside, thus bringing forth how power and violence operate in intimate spaces. The ‘toughness’ essentially comes from place of maternal love, which quite obviously cannot be permitted to exist in any other aspect of her life.

Patriarchy can be generous and benevolent only when one conforms to normative gender roles and does not challenge the power hierarchies both in private and public contexts. Operating strictly within the framework of specialised gender roles of a male bread winner and female caregiver, such ads glorify women’s unpaid care work within the household. They appeal to the societal notions of a ‘good’ woman who seeks fulfilment only through her roles as a wife/mother/daughter. A professional ‘good woman’ strikes a balance between her home and career.

The benevolent patriarchy works in the form of the ‘helping’/’sympathetic’ husband/male figure but does not restructure the conventional notion of the household being the primary responsibility of the woman. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2017, on an average, 66% of women’s work in India is unpaid, compared to 12% of men’s. In 2013, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights stated that the unequal burden of unpaid care work on women was a barrier to women’s full enjoyment of their human rights.

While seeking to make feminism ‘feel good’, such ostensibly empowering adverts undermine the feminist struggles that affirmed the personal as political and work against democratising the intimate sphere. In the advertisement in question, the woman’s immediate demonisation when she falls outside the gambit of the accepted definitions of a ‘good’ mother and her apparent redemption (from a man) is an example of how reproductive and nurturing processes are bound within hegemonic constructions of gender and power.

Ad campaigns like the All Out ones and a host of others similar to this (another recent one for a Hindi television channel, Colors that urges the viewers to give women Sunday off – “Sunday Is Her Holiday”) were released around the time of International Women’s Day, re-affirming the idea of women being separate beings who can serve the ideas of tokenism as long as capitalist, patriarchal ways flourish by suppressing them.

What is truly disturbing is that Sircar is known for his cinematic venture, Piku, where the titular character, an empowered, independent, single woman is someone who chaffs at the sacrificial role of caregiver to her ageing, belligerent father, despite her love for him. That the same auteur can think of an unidimensional understanding where benign patriarchal structures have appropriated and implemented a deep understanding of feminism to actually subsume it into these very same structures. While claiming to understand ideas like sexual division of labour and the subjugation of women’s roles to the margins, this newest form of patriarchy has a mask like no other: that of feminism.

Upasana Mahanta is an Associate Professor and Executive Director in the Centre for Women, Law and Social Change, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University. Yasodhara Rakshit is a faculty member at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities.