What it is
The gender myth of perfume advertising is the claim, made by Deng and Shi via Barthes, that the genre systematically presents a specific configuration of gender — white, heterosexual, bourgeois femininity and masculinity — as natural and self-evident. “Myth,” in Barthes’s sense, is ideology that has lost its history: gender norms that are constructed and contingent appear, through the accumulation of advertising imagery, as simply the way things are. Deng and Shi call this the “false obvious.”
Why it matters
Perfume advertising is a particularly high-stakes site for this analysis because the commodity cannot be sold on its own terms (see Communicative Anosmia). The ad must substitute desire for demonstration — and desire, in this genre, is organized around bodies, gender, and sexuality. The ideological work is not incidental to the genre; it is, on Deng and Shi’s argument, constitutive of it. If gender myth is what the ad is structurally required to produce, then critique of perfume advertising is necessarily critique of the representational politics of desire.
Key points
- Content analysis of 45 perfume commercials: 95% white protagonists, 64% physical nudity, 73% direct sexual behavior or explicit sexual implication; intimate interactions almost exclusively heterosexual The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- Hall’s representation theory: the ads construct gender through two linked “systems of representation” — a conceptual map (mental categories) and a sign system (language, image, sound) that links those categories to meaning. Neither system is neutral The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- Barthes’s myth: the gender norms encoded in these ads “have been artificially divided” and then naturalized. Myth conceals its own constructedness; it presents the contingent as inevitable The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- Mulvey’s male gaze: women function as objects of fetishistic scopophilia — “builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself.” Even “independent woman” narratives are organized for male visual pleasure The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- Butler’s gender performativity: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame.” Advertising is one institution that enforces this repetition and makes it look natural The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- The double bind of “liberation” narratives: the Miss Dior commercial presents a woman who walks out on her wedding as emblematic of freedom and independence — but the narrative’s visual logic (male gaze, heterosexual resolution via helicopter pilot-as-love-object) reinstalls the norms it appears to transgress The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- Symptomatic reading: what the ad cannot say — that perfume cannot elevate your status, resolve social contradictions, or deliver the independence it promises — is as diagnostic as what it shows. The “free, independent, and bold femininity” is an imaginative solution to a real problem that the commodity cannot address The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- Racial coding: perfume commercials “tend to be less localized, using few actors or models from the target market’s country and always prefer white models.” The 95% white protagonist figure holds across a global industry The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
- Erotic body coding is consistent across the genre: toned male bodies (white shirts, abs, beards), sexualized female bodies (floor-length silk, stilettos, bare skin), water imagery eroticized as fluidity and penetration The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials, Communicative Anosmia and Poetics of Storytelling in Perfume Commercials.
Evidence across sources
Deng and Shi (2024) provide the argument’s main architecture: Hall’s representation → Barthes’s myth → Butler’s performativity → symptomatic reading. Their close analyses of Dior’s Miss Dior and J’adore commercials show how the “goddess” figure functions as a parody of heteronormative gender norms — the audience is invited to aspire to or possess the “ideal self” the ad constructs, which places them inside the binary structure they think they are escaping.
Leleń (2022) addresses gender at several points without it being her central frame. She documents the same erotic body coding (YSL Rive Gauche, 1979: independent woman whose independence is coded through the display of her legs; Beyoncé Heat: restricted in the UK for being “too sexually suggestive”). She also identifies what she reads as a genuine counter-example: the Kenzo World ad (Spike Jonze, Margaret Qualley, 2016), where “the dance choreography makes the woman character non-feminine and non-sensual” through deliberately anti-erotic movement and gender-ambiguous role-playing. This reading directly conflicts with the Deng & Shi framework, which implies no perfume commercial can escape the gender myth. See Disagreements below.
Disagreements
The status of Kenzo World as subversion or capture
Leleń argues that the Kenzo World commercial (2016, dir. Spike Jonze) “defies this erotically-underpinned pattern.” Qualley’s choreography — “vigorous arms wriggling and leg kicking, accompanied by facial grimace patterns” — is read as deliberately non-sensual and gender-destabilizing. The character “adopts a range of roles, including masculine ones.” Leleń treats this as evidence that the genre can generate genuine counter-examples to erotic body coding Communicative Anosmia and Poetics of Storytelling in Perfume Commercials.
Deng and Shi do not address Kenzo World, but their theoretical framework produces a counter-reading: Butler’s performativity argues that gendered behavior is constituted through repeated regulatory acts within a “highly rigid regulatory frame.” An ad that performs gender ambiguity within that frame may parody the norm without escaping it — Butler’s own term for such moves is “subversive repetition,” but she is careful to distinguish subversive parody from genuine transformation. Applied to Kenzo World: the ad’s commercial function (selling Kenzo perfume, circulating within the fashion industry) places it firmly inside the heteronormative representational economy Deng and Shi describe, regardless of its choreographic content The False Obvious Gender Myth in Perfume Commercials.
Neither source resolves this. It is a live question whether formal subversion of erotic convention constitutes ideological escape, or whether it is recuperated by the genre’s structural conditions. The Kenzo World case is a strong seminar test.
Open questions
- Is the 95% white protagonist figure replicated outside Deng and Shi’s sample? Their methodology (search engine results, 45 commercials) is not robustly documented.
- How does gender myth function in fragrance markets that are not organized around the Western white bourgeois norm? Japanese, Korean, and Gulf perfume advertising would be a significant comparative test.
- Does the advent of gender-neutral fragrances (CK One is the precedent; the 2010s–2020s proliferation) change the representational logic, or does it reproduce it in a new key?
- What is the relationship between the male gaze as organizing logic and the fact that the majority of perfume buyers are women? Mulvey’s framework assumes a male spectating subject; does that assumption hold in a genre where the consumer is predominantly female?
Prompts
- Deng and Shi argue that Miss Dior’s “liberation” narrative (Portman walks out on her wedding) is a “false obvious” — the ad sells independence while reinstalling the male gaze. Where does this leave the viewer who genuinely feels interpellated by the narrative? Is ideological capture compatible with authentic emotional response?
- The symptomatic reading approach asks what the ad cannot say. Apply it to a perfume commercial of your choice: what real social contradiction does it offer to imaginatively resolve? What does the commodity actually do, and what does the ad promise it will do?
- Leleń reads Kenzo World as subversion; Deng and Shi’s framework implies recuperation. Pick a side and defend it. What would you need to show to win the argument?
- The 95% white protagonist figure is stark. Does perfume advertising’s racial homogeneity follow from the genre’s gender logic, or is it a separate ideological operation with its own history? Can Hall’s representation theory account for both simultaneously?