Week 4: Feminism in advertising campaigns.
Dear car girl, you can be whoever you want, redefine what is expected of you, push the boundaries, and go above and beyond, because you are capable of anything!
At least, that’s the message Ford’s ‘Dear Car Girl’ advert loudly proclaims. In a video in the style of an open letter released for 2024 International Women’s Day, motor company Ford has women from a variety of auto backgrounds narrate the life of a ‘car girl’.
A ‘car girl’ refers to women with an interest in cars; whether it be racing, driving, mechanics, a woman with a passion for cars is a car girl. The video aims to inspire women to be more open in sharing their passion for cars, and to be proud of what they do.
But are Ford’s intentions with this video letter genuine? Does Ford really strive for women to become inspired to get more involved in the automotive industry? Let’s break it down a little.
Ford is trying to prove that they, as a company, care about women. But on a deeper level, this could simply come down to the fact that Ford knows that they have means of production– they have the power to extend dominant ideologies. Currently, we can think of the rise of feminism in the Western world as a progressively more dominant ideology, and, as Marx says, dominant ideologies are not fictitious, but they only represent the perspective of the ruling class, while ideologies of the lower classes are ignored.
For Ford, they pride themselves in having a legacy that is “rich with women’s contributions”, recognising that women have historically, and continuously, been integral players in automotive innovations.
Sometimes, feminism presented in the media is ‘safe’. ‘Popular Feminism’, described by Banet-Weiser in her 2019 book Empowered suggests that feminism in media tends to place an individual responsibility on solving the problems women face in their day-to-day lives. This type of feminism is most often associated with empowerment, but also consumption, and it is this feminism that is most easily integrated into, and is distributed through, our digital media and receives the most visibility. And while on the surface, so much visibility towards feminism may appear to be doing society good but, Banet-Weiser argues that it’s doing a lot more harm than we think. Media friendly versions of feminism obscure the core issues– they obscure the calls to examine and critique the patriarchal structures that our society sits upon.
So how can we be sure that Ford is making the change? I think what we need to examine here is the choice in words Ford has used, more specifically, why a car girl? Why not refer to them as ‘car women’? Some would argue ‘car women’ doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily, and maybe one could even say it’s so that younger girls feel inspired by the video too. But if we think about popular feminism and media friendly approaches, perhaps the choice of ‘girls’; was more deliberate than it being a catchy phrase. It still conveys the naivety and innocence of a child, and yet juxtaposes it with the motor industry– an industry most often associated with men.
And that’s all well and good, to show women that we can achieve whatever we want in fields dominated by men. But other than telling us that we are in control of the path we carve for ourselves, what is Ford doing to enable us to achieve that?