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REDEFINING MALE BEAUTY: THE CULTURAL ENCODING OF MASCULINITY IN SOUTH KOREAN COSMETICS ADVERTISING
Advertising both reflects and creates social norms and cultural practices, such as concepts of beauty and gender roles. Research suggests that masculinity, like femininity, is constructed, codified and contested in advertising imagery (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004). By drawing on cultural categories to depict gendered consumer selves, advertising messages often limit and structure possibilities of masculine and feminine consumption. As marketers promote the blurring of traditional gender lines around product categories to open their products to a wider market, men increasingly consume products that are traditionally reserved for female consumption (Thompson & Hirschman, 1995). Despite the growing global men’s grooming market, research suggests that men view the consumption of cosmetics as not acceptable ‘masculine’ consumption behavior (Hall, Gough, & Seymour-Smith, 2013). According to Kolbe and Albanese (1996), masculinity is represented in advertising by images of strong and muscular ‘male icons’. In order to protect their masculine identities men reject advertising images that do not reflect these masculine traits (Elliot & Elliot, 2005). However, with advertising literature focusing on a notion of masculinity that is prevalent in Western individualistic cultures, cross-cultural research in this area is extremely limited. Given the cultural relativity of masculinity and attractiveness, images of masculinity and forms of accepted ‘masculine’ consumption behavior are likely to vary across cultures (e.g., Englis, Solomon, & Ashmore, 1994). For instance, the use of cosmetics may be regarded as acceptable ‘masculine’ behavior in South Korea, where young men spend more per-capita on cosmetics than their counterparts anywhere else in the world (Euromonitor, 2015). The aim of this research is to explore representations of masculinity in South Korean cosmetics advertising. We carry out a content analysis of print ads examining i) What types of male images do advertisers use in South Korean cosmetics advertisements?; and ii) What kind of masculinity do male images in South Korean cosmetics ads represent?
