You've Come a Long Way,Buddy!

With some regularity over the past several decades, the notions and images that helped define prior standards of ap- propriate male behavior have been discarded for new ones that pre- sumably better accommodated the times. As a result of the latest transformation, traditional sex role boundaries between the genders began to fade. Over the last half-decade or so advertising itself has increasingly reflected a transposition in sex role portrayals that has come to be labeled as reverse-sexism (Boddewyn, 1991). The conse- quences associated with the emergence of these sex role reversals and the accompanying possibility that men or women may react negatively to their new gender depictions in advertising are ad- dressed in this national study.