DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

I Can Bring Home the Bacon, Fry It up in a Pan!

The Enjoli Woman as an Agent of Socialization

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I watched a lot of television, usually stretched out in the floor on my stomach, chin propped up on my hands. It might have been Hee-Haw with my grandparents or Solid Gold with my dad. Saturday nights were often spent with my slightly-older-than-I aunt, watching The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

I especially loved watching soap operas with my mom and my grandmother. They would start around 10:00 in the morning and run until 3:00 in the afternoon. My mom checked me out of school early on November 17, 1981, so we could be home in time to watch the highly-anticipated wedding of Luke and Laura (Luke and Laura).

Because this was before the advent of the DVR or streaming, I was a captive audience for commercials. Lots of commercials. It was common for my friends and me to skip rope and do special hand jive game thingies to jingles. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese…. (McDonald's, 1975) I spent hours practicing teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony (Coca-Cola, 1971). Some days, I am plagued by earworms of jingles from my childhood, especially a specific Kmart Christmas jingle (Kmart, 1979) and the one encouraging me to have a Pepsi day! (Pepsi, 1977).

I totally get why David Sedaris’ childhood ambition was to star in a one-man show that consisted of him “dressed in a nice shirt and tie and singing a medley of commercial jingles in the voice of Billie Holiday” (Sedaris, 2000, p. 7).

One of the most memorable commercials for me is an ad for Enjoli Perfume (by Charles of the Ritz) (Enjoli, 1980), which featured an adaptation of Peggy Lee’s “I’m a Woman” (Leiber & Stoller, 1963). Whereas Lee could “feed the baby, grease the car, and powder [her] face at the same time” while her man brought home the money for her to pay the bills, the Enjoli woman could “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man.” (Enjoli) She would, in fact, work until 5:00 and then come home and read Tickety-Tock (presumably to her children and not to her husband), and then kiss her man and give him shivers, if it’s lovin’ he wants.

Like many women of my generation, this ad impacted me. For years, I thought the Enjoli woman was beautiful and smart and powerful and glamorous, and that was exactly the kind of woman I wanted to be. She was a stunning manifestation of the work of the Women’s Movement, especially as the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (Alice Paul Institute) was waged around the children of the 70s.

For me specifically, the 1980 Enjoli Perfume commercial acted as an agent of socialization by establishing unreasonable expectations of how and what a woman should be, leading to my own unhealthy emulation of those attainable-but-not-maintainable standards.

Socialization is the unstructured, informal training in social norms and values. Traditionally, the word was used to describe “children and their acquisition of attitudes, skills and behaviors which are appropriate for social life” (Vela, Romero, & Giner, 2006, p. 84), though today “it is seen as including all the processes through which the individual acquires the various social roles that he or she plays throughout life….” The most identifiable agents of socialization are parents, peers, and the media, “all of which exercise varying degrees of influence in different stages of the individual’s life.”

Socialization conserves culture as it “entrenches the status quo and transmits certain ideas, values and customs from generation to generation,” (Eagle, 1988, p. 68) contributing a “sense of shared value and community which provide children with the skills necessary to become accepted and competent members of a group.”

Often, socialization through mass media is built upon portrayals of stereotypes, especially gender stereotypes, because those cognitive schemes “are well known to everyone and help the receivers to understand the concept of the message” (Wolska, 2011). Gender stereotypes in commercials are “adapted to the specific, either male or female target, and are ‘the reflection of the recipient,’” not only satisfying needs of the audience but also creating them.

Watching men and women on television who behave happily in stereotypical ways, “we are given yet another model to match ourselves against,” (Eagle, 1988, p. 73) different from our families and peer groups. “Advertising models a pattern of behavior that is held out to be ‘the good life’…and this is shown to be the ideal for all to strive toward” (Pollay, 1986, p. 26).

As the work of the Women’s Movement of the mid-20th century began to come to fruition, commercial portrayals of women began to shift as well. While there were still ads that depicted women as happy housewives, advertisers also began to target women who worked outside the home.

The Enjoli commercial depicts a thin, beautiful woman who is happy to work all day, come home and cook dinner for the family for whom she provides, and then cater to her husband’s sexual whims. It’s the “eight-hour perfume for the twenty-four-hour woman” (Enjoli, 1980).

This commercial combines stereotypes of the liberated woman, the happy housewife, the doting mother, and the sexy vamp, creating in women the desire to be all things at once—tirelessly, in full make-up and with perfect hair.

And all you need to satisfy that desire is a bottle of perfume!

In reality, this contributed to the creation of the second-shift woman, the one who works a job outside the home but is “still expected to take responsibility for domestic tasks and childrearing” (Eagle, 1988, p. 76), which further led to the cultural expectation that women be superwomen who “are expected to do it all” (Wood & Fixmer-Oraiz, 2015, p. 159)

Historically, girls’ behavior focused on “relational and intimacy work, nurturance and emotional supportiveness, and a concern with developing feminine allure” (Adler, 1992, p. 170). However, societal changes influenced by the Women’s Movement and “the vast entry of women into the work force… profoundly affected adult women’s gender roles, expanding and androgenizing them.” By the last quarter of the 20th century, women were expected to maintain their own historical roles and take on traditionally male roles, as well.

As a young girl in this burgeoning time, I internalized those stereotypes, especially through television commercials and other advertising, and I was socialized to believe that I not only could but should be all things to all people. Additionally, I was not to expect male roles to androgenize; men were still men, after all.

According to the Enjoli commercial, I would never let my husband forget he’s a man, because I’m a woman and that’s what I’m supposed to do. I know what I am, I know my role and place, and I need no reassurance for any insecurities I might feel—though how could I feel insecure? I’m perfect! I am able to support both of us and our entire family.

I was encouraged to climb down and let my husband take my place on that pedestal—and then hoist it up on my hip with the baby.

For the first twelve years after my elder son was born, I worked only part-time as a bookkeeper for small businesses. Predominantly, I was a mother and homemaker. I loved being a stay-at-home mom, and I was mostly very good at it. I managed a household, took care of two children, and attended to anything and everything my husband needed me to do while he worked often sixty or more hours per week.

Trying to do everything, to be everything, was exhausting. When I’d had enough and asked my husband for help, for reassurance when I felt myself faltering under the pressure, he occasionally offered to cook dinner for the kids, like the unseen man in the Enjoli ad. Mostly, he didn’t understand why I would need reassurance, and our marriage fell apart.

“Imitation requires some effort, perhaps frustrating, and the prior acceptance of an unworthiness of one’s own life experiences” (Pollay, 1986, p. 26). Although I’d had brief, productive, happy periods of time when I’d been independent and self-actualized, I rejected that version of myself in order to create the Enjoli version of Stephanie. Ultimately, the over-exertion pushed me to illness in my 30s and 40s, including an auto-immune disorder called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, which ultimately leads to severe hypothyroidism and its sometimes debilitating health effects.

Anecdotally, it is common for women with Hashimoto’s to be “uber-productive, caring, and dynamic” (Robbins, 2016) with histories of “abuse, neglect or injury in their childhood.” Such prior trauma can create issues of worth, and they will often “bypass their inner signals to ‘stop in the name of health’ and keep going so that she can keep being worthy of love.”

My own history mirrors that description, littered with childhood and adolescent sexual and physical abuse. As an adult, I slowly worked myself sick, all in an effort to be perfect, to anticipate everyone else’s expectations and to surpass those expectations—before everyone else even knew what they expected. And I wanted to look good while I did it, so I lost 115 pounds and underwent three reconstructive surgeries to correct all of the imperfections I could.

And then three years later, after surviving a divorce and learning to balance two sons with three part-time jobs and full-time college—which I traded for full-time work and part-time university—I found myself gaining weight and incredibly fatigued.

Hello, Hashimoto!

So now I’m battling back from illness again, forced to slow down or get sicker. No one sees the Enjoli woman thirty years later, when she’s wrinkled and sagging and battling osteoporosis, trying to clean her home by herself with her hunched back and hands gnarled from arthritis, while her husband snores in the recliner her ungrateful, never-around children bought him for Christmas fifteen years ago.

More stereotypes, I know.

All that time in college has taught me to discount stereotypes and generalizations, but they are easily-processed representations of ideas, even when they come from within our own minds rather than from outside sources. Advertisers are aware that consumers, even children, “employ stereotypes in their daily interpersonal interaction, so their use in advertising reduces the risk of ambiguity hindering the advertisement’s decoding by the audience” (Vela, Romero, & Giner, 2006, p. 85). It is that decoding which allows advertisements to be agents of socialization “which have a continuous effect on the individual’s behavior, skills and attitudes” (p. 97), as well as “unintended consequences on the values and lifestyles adopted by members of society” (p. 98).

Including little girls who wanted to be everything when they grew up.

During an informal online conversation with my friends this week, it was interesting to see how different people remember reacting to the Enjoli commercial. My male contemporaries mostly commented that they thought the woman was pretty and that she had bacon, but they also recognized the differences between the Enjoli woman and their own mothers, even those who did work outside the home. One friend who was raised in a conservative Christian, traditionally-nuclear family, said he remembers it as being divergent from his norms and therefore an attempt to normalize what was not normal.

My female contemporaries ran the gamut of love to loathe. Like I did, some loved the glamorous woman who could do and be everything, and they wanted to be just like her. Others recognized how ridiculous it was to expect anyone to try to fulfill all social and familial roles. One friend commented that she always hated the ad because it implied that women who didn’t meet unrealistic expectations were less of a woman.

As a child, I never saw an actual bottle of Enjoli perfume. As an adult, any perfume that is strong enough to last all day will likely just give me a nasty headache. Further, as I move toward healthier expectations of myself, I realize I don’t have to be that Enjoli woman. I can hear the jingle, or even sing it quietly on a loop to myself at my desk, and not have to emulate that outdated trope any more than I have to emulate her outdated hair and makeup.

Works Cited

Adler, P. A. (1992, July). Socialization to Gender Roles: Popularity among Elementary School Boys and Girls". Sociology of Education, 65(3), 169-187. Retrieved July 6, 2016, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2112807

Alice Paul Institute. (n.d.). The Equal Rights Amendment. Retrieved July 7, 2016, from EqualRightsAmendment.org: http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/

Coca-Cola. (1971). I'd LIke to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony). Retrieved July 9, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-Qiyklq-Q

Eagle, G. (1988). Learning to Become a "Natural Woman": The Process of Socialisation. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, No. 2, 67-80. Retrieved July 6, 2016, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4065701

Enjoli. (1980). Enjoli Perfume Jingle. Retrieved July 7, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0_uhUhqrbk

Kmart. (1979). Christmas Jingle. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNLYE2VM1Ho

Leiber, J., & Stoller, M. (1963). I'm a Woman [Recorded by P. Lee]. Retrieved July 7, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhkwRBGZEN4

Luke and Laura. (n.d.). Retrieved July 7, 2016, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_and_Laura

McDonald's. (1975). Big Mac Jingle. Retrieved July 7, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK2qBbDn5W0

Pepsi. (1977). Have a Pepsi Day! Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym8BuMEEmwg

Pollay, R. W. (1986, April). The Distorted Mirror: Reflections on the Uninended Consequences of Advertising. Journal of Marketing, 50(2), 18-36. Retrieved July 6, 2016, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1251597

Robbins, R. (2016, June 15). Married to Hashimoto's: A Husband's Confession - Where I Blew It. Retrieved July 6, 2016, from HypothyroidMom.com: http://hypothyroidmom.com/married-to-hashimotos-a-husbands-confession-where-i-blew-it/

Sedaris, D. (2000). Me Talk Pretty One Day. Retrieved July 7, 2016, from http://study.kis.net.ua/pluginfile.php/42072/mod_resource/content/1/Me%20Talk%20Pretty%20One%20Day.pdf

Vela, M. R., Romero, M. J., & Giner, E. C. (2006). Advetising content as a socialization agent: potential reinforcement of gender stereotypes. ESIC Market, 81-105. Retrieved July 6, 2016, from http://www.esic.edu/documentos/revistas/esicmk/070118_140611_i.pdf

Wolska, M. (2011). Gender Stereotypes in Mass Media. Case Study: Analysis of the Gender Stereotyping Phenomenon in TV Commercials. Retrieved July 7, 2016, from Krytka.org: http://krytyka.org/gender-stereotypes-in-mass-media-case-study-analysis-of-the-gender-stereotyping-phenomenon-in-tv-commercials/

Wood, J. T., & Fixmer-Oraiz, N. (2015). Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, & Culture (12th ed.). United States: Cengage Learning.

Save