Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Ivan Davis

Abstract

The award-winning Dos Equis "The most interesting man in the world" and Old Spice "the man your man could smell like" campaigns are unique not only for their creativity and humor, but also for their portrait of ideal men. These campaigns propose idealized images of masculinity which engage societal conceptions of manhood in the 21st century. Using rhetorical criticism, we can identify underlying ideologies in these campaigns, which combine the traditional and modern masculine constructs to present a new identity that aims but ultimately fails to be universally pleasing. The campaigns also reinforce sexist views of women as childlike and superficial and homosexuality as unnatural.

Subject Area

Advertising., Gender identity in advertising, Masculinity in advertising.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/79/

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