Normalizing violence against men?: Exploring policy to decrease misandry in popular marketing strategies and advertisements

Marketing has one dominant goal – get the consumer to buy products. That said several strategies are employed by marketers to promote and ultimately sell their products such as the 4 P’s model (product, price, placement, and promotion). The socioeconomic and competitive context/climate in which products are promoted, play significant roles in crafting messages. One approach used with increasing frequency is product promotion by putting other products or people in a negative context; in this case, supporting misandry and normalizing violence in men to sell products to targeted female demographics. This social erosion of men and masculinity takes different forms including comedy, the “stupid guy” role, “incompetent dad” role, uninformed male, and lacking a general sense of morality in favor of mindless duty. Such blatant examples of misandry and even violence toward men in marketing is increasingly common and becoming even “normalized” due to it being a “low-risk” strategy in contrast to similar principles applied to women. As commercial media messages increasingly support a negative binary of male roles, a negative precedent is set, particularly when planning or delivering effective health promotive public health programs. Viewing masculinity as a liability and using pro- and hyper-feminist strategies and concepts in marketing to capitalize on this is harming men overall and likely undermines public health programs geared toward using masculinity as a positive attribute. The purpose of this session is to identify examples and messaging cues that normalize violence and misandry concepts in popular media, discuss how these messages negatively impact male health using mental health and masculinity concepts as a context, and help public health professionals use media literacy concepts and policy to deconstruct misandrogenistic messages and advertisements to advocate for a more gender-appropriate and responsible approach toward media’s depiction of men when marketing products and services.