Go and take a look at lisa’s blog (part of the ASA contextsblogs), devoted to the sociologocal analysis of images, which features a youtube snippet of a wilkinson ad, which will come in handy at my summer semester teaching course on “public and private as categories of growing up”:
The video shows how the idea of the private space is organized: as a familial space (the owned house, populated by a core family, a pet), a clearly gendered parent arrangement (mother loves and nurtures, father is supposed to enjoy his spare time at home) as well as a generational ordered space (the child doesn’t have any function exept “being loved” by its mother therefore center of the family’s affection and a thread to the parental relationship). Because the father is no longer king in his castle, the private sphere becomes a contested terrain, a classical topic since second wave feminism – only here it’s not the woman (all passive, reacting knee-jerkingly to soft skin) who demands changes of the man, but the child.
(another example for the threatened masculinity: yesterday I stumbled upon Burger King’s current “communication campaign” Mancademy, rallying a cry for the reconquering of masculinity. Unsurprisingly, there is a forerunning campaign of in the US claiming “Men Eat Meat“).
Ironically, the message sent out in the wilkinson ad demands shaving (the elimination of body hair is another topos of emasculation). The man here is depicted as willing to change for his wife, only to fortify the generational front. By shifting the focus towards the child, the generational order is highlighted (although the child is clearly gendered by its transformation into a fighting machine).
The means the child uses to train are toys, the training ground is the child’s room. The child’s space is therefore one which is secluded and secret. Even the dog as a private listener and observer of the child is being punished for intruding into the architecture of childhood. Even the fight for kisses takes place without the mother (who is nothing more than the occasion) on a typical backstage: the bathroom.
