It's not so easy being a 1990's man

IF ONLY My Husband Was Evolving Too, complains a car advertisement which goes on to berate the unfortunate man for his shortcomings. "Take his dress sense for instance. If you can call it sense. It's practically impossible to tell when he's changed into his gardening clothes. As for his eating habits. . . well . . . let's just say he was completely routed at the Battle of the Bulge and now he's grateful just to keep to single, chins. Rather than coasting gently into his mellower years, he seems to be blundering in with all the finesse of Laurel and Hardy

Compared to his car which is restless in the pursuit of self improvement", the subject of this advertisement is a sad creature. But at least in today's adland he won't be lonely, populated as it is with increasing numbers of male saddos and incompetents men who are unable to clean a bath or operate a video manual, men who microwave and eat the cat's dinner, men who fall to pieces in the kitchen, men who are unable to organise an air trip without the help of a patronising wife and secretary.

In the old days, only women in ads were stupid. Now we more regularly see the sort of role reversal summed up by Mr and Ms Prudential "She's going to use the money to get a life travel, luxury, adventure he's a geek who can't see further, her than marriage and mortgage.

Another new ad role for men is that of sex object. It began with Nick Kamen taking off those jeans in that launderette, thereby launching one of the most successful ad campaigns ever. The 501 ads, says cultural commentator Suzanne Moore, "managed to connect Levis to a nostalgic longing for a simpler time ... But when the camera focused on the leather belt sliding off, the assured unbuttoning of the flies or James Mardle easing himself into the bath, a different kind of longing altogether was evoked".

A current ad from Diet Coke makes that female desire explicit. In a neat reversal of what usually happens on building sites, a male site worker is the subject of lustful attention from the female office workers who overlook his building.

Every day at "Diet Coke time", they down tools to crowd round the window and watch him drink. As they lick their lips, we're left in no doubt that it's not just the Coke they're thirsting for.

Nowadays, we accept the fact that the half naked body making love to a bottle of scent will not necessarily be female. Even Dunnes Stores got in on the act at Christmas, with a male model in underpants, bumping and bulging in all the right places, lying back in a pose unimaginable for a man 10 years ago.

These changes stupid men, sexy men are the ad world's response to the women's movement to the changing balance of power between the sexes, to women's increased spending potential and, most specifically, to the critiques which feminism has consistently made of advertising itself.

These critiques took a variety of forms but mostly focused on advertising's perpetuation of sexist stereotypes and its presentation of unattainable standards of perfection as within reach if only the right product is purchased.

In her book, Where The Girls Are Growing Up Female the The Mass Media, Susan J. Douglas speaks of "one of capitalism's great strengths perhaps its greatest its ability to co opt and domesticate opposition, to transubstantiate criticism into a host of new, marketable products". So it has been with advertising's response to feminist criticism.

YOU want equality, asked the ad makers? Okay, they replied, their greedy gaze on the unmoisturised, unscented skin of the other half of the population, we'll do our darndest to get men feeling as self conscious as you do. Women asked for men who were more caring adland gave them men who care deeply about how they look.

One of the recurrent themes of the feminist critique was the serious consequences of the approach of let's make em feel inferior so they buy our product. Susan J. Douglas puts it thus "Even women who do and should know better have been worked over so well that whenever we look at ourselves in the mirror or, worse, have to be seen in public in a bathing suit, all we can feel is disgust and shame."

Now it looks like images of perfect pectorals and washboard midriffs are having the same effect on men as pneumatic breasts and bums of steel have long had on women. American, and more recently, British research indicates that boys and men are far more body conscious than they were a generation ago and are now presenting with eating disorders in increasing numbers.

A British survey in 1953 found that height was the physical attribute that most concerned men. But research today suggests that 1990s man is most worried by stomach size, chest shape and hair texture. As these are mostly amenable to surgical intervention it is hardly surprising that more men are presenting for cosmetic surgery. In 1993, for example, 44 per cent of the face lift operations and 47 per cent of liposuction procedures at the Pountney Clinic in London were performed on men. Twenty years ago the figures were half that.

There are indications that some men, at least, are aware of the role that advertising has played in these developments. While the number of complaints received about the portrayal of men in advertising is small, the Advertising Standards Association of Ireland, (ASAI) says they are increasing. "Complaints about men in ads made up a small proportion of the objections we receive," says Noel McMahon of ASAI. "But as little as five years ago we never received complaints about men at all."

When men complain about their portrayal in ads, they often suggest that women are no longer subject to sexist treatment. A complainant to the ASAI about the "If Only My Husband Was Evolving" ad, for example, considered the advertisement "reflected an inferior level of treatment than is now generally accorded to women in advertisements". He obviously hasn't seen any washing powder ads lately.

The truth is that we are so accustomed to seeing women portrayed as airheads or sex objects that we no longer notice it, while" seeing men in the same role still carries some shock value.

THE upper end of the advertising market, however, knows that merely displaying a naked, woman won't shift a quality product any more. "It would be unusual these days to see a woman lying off in a pose like that adopted by the man in the Dunnes Stores poster," says Gareth Kinsella, account director at McConnell's Advertising Agency.

"With a man it's acceptable, but with a woman it would seem dated. Good ads featuring semi naked women will be given an ironic treatment, like the Wonderbra `Hello Boys' ad, for example.

Ah yes, irony, the intellectual escape route which packages old attitudes as up to the minute.

Take a sexist image or idea, show you know that it's sexist, and viola You're not a neanderthal, but one hip dude.

As showing naked women becomes more problematic, and as the male market increasingly comes under the greedy eye the beauty business, we can expect to see more objectification of male, bodies for female consumption. It, is still women who buy most men's clothes and cosmetics and many women enjoy such images, and the novel experience of, having sexual imagery directed at their gaze.

Similarly, women's vanity may be massaged by ads depicting female indulgence or male incompetence or stupidity.

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that in adland there is only one aim maximising the client's profits. The new roles for men in advertising may tap into women's it's about time he got a taste of what it's like feelings. But open season on both sexes is not quite what campaigners for equality in advertising had in mind, and hardly represents progress.