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Unhealthy Consumerism: An Analysis of the "Cleaner of Your Dreams"
In 2017, the popular cleaning product brand Mr. Clean ran a commercial during Super Bowl 51, featuring a slightly controversial plot. The advertisement opens with a woman disdained with uncleanliness in her house. She looks up to see a digitally generated Mr. Clean, who begins to do daily chores in a provocative, sexual manner with the woman following closely behind, clearly aroused by the actions, with a soundtrack clearly associated with sex (repeatedly using the terms "Ecstasy" and "Fantasy"). It ends with the reveal that the masculine Mr. Clean character is actually her husband, who is actually just cleaning the house. She follows this by tackling him onto the couch, implying they're about to have sex, with a title appearing, reading: "You Gotta Love A Man Who Cleans." (Cleaner of Your Dreams 2017) This commercial, made for Super Bowl 51 in 2017, is an example of an advertisement that doesn't directly sexualize women, but still notes their supposed role as a homemaker, responsible for cooking, cleaning, bearing children and having sex. The ad implies that variation from this, like a man being the one to clean the house, is outside the status quo and is an exception.
Unhealthy Consumerism
It would not be unreasonable for a woman to view this ad and find it at least somewhat offensive- should it be marked as uniquely special for a man to be expected to perform daily chores? And is this specific product relevant at all to this? Jean Kilbourne wrote the following in her essay, "Three Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt": "Wouldn't it be wonderful if, realizing the importance of relationships in all of our lives, we could seek to learn relational skills from women and to help men develop these strengths in themselves?...Popular culture usually trivializes these abilities in women, [and] mocks men who have real intimacy with women..." (Kilbourne, 490-91) By portraying that a man should help with chores in exchange for sex, or even slightly mocking relationships in which responsibilities like this are shared, like in the ad, it pushes an unhealthy image of relationships with the sole objective of selling more products.
(Figure 1: Final frame (#720) from "Cleaner of Your Dreams")
The tagline greatly exemplifies the supposed expectation of reward for a man doing daily chores.
Masked Sexualization
(Figure 2: Frame 520 from "Cleaner of Your Dreams")
The woman makes overtly sexual, almost orgasmic movements.
While this ad does a good job of not promoting forceful sex, or unnecessary promiscuous sexualization of the woman featured, as soon as the masculine Mr. Clean is revealed, she turns into effectively a model, making suggestive poses and actions. At timestamp 0:20, she descends further into this sexualization, letting her hair down, moving her hips back and forth, running her hands through her hair, and letting her loose clothes become unkempt, all while maintaining almost orgasmic facial expressions. This parallels what Kilbourne wrote: "Sex in advertising is pornographic because it dehumanizes and objectifies people, especially women, and because it fetishizes products, imbues them with an erotic charge- which dooms us to dissapointment since products never can fulfull our sexual desires or meet our emotional needs." (Kilbourne, 489) It is very obvious that this ad fetishizes the product; it's an overly sexual Mr. Clean striving to turn on a housewife, and the commercial ends in sex. There should be no expectation by men that this product could make their wives attracted to them again should they purchase it.
Generic Consumer Appeal
Additionally, the advertisement attempts to appeal to a very generic audience; it utilizes an attractive white woman and her somewhat overweight husband (another topic concerning body images on its own). In her documentary Killing Us Softly 4, Kilbourne notes that most ads tend to try to appeal to all audiences, but tend to only use white or whitewashed actors to make their models as "normal" as possible (Killing, 8:00-9:00). This specific commercial is not trying to advertise a beauty product, nor is much emphasis placed on the looks of the actress herself (therefore not much fault can be put with the production crew for this), it was normalized by decades of precedents set well before it.
(Figure 3: Frame from Killing Us Softly 4)
This makeup ad demonstrates the clear bias towards white, or "clear", skin in advertising.
Conclusion
(Figure 4: Google search displaying thumbnails of Swiffer commercials)
Overall, this advertisement certainly does not improve the view of a woman's role in relationships. However, as noted in the final paragraph, not all of this necessarily falls on the creators of the commercial. It is a result of the thousands of advertisements before it that set the precedent for what these ads represent. While it is notably less sexual when compared to other advertisements from companies like Calvin Klein and Victoria Secret, and infamously Carl's Jr./Hardee's, it still maintains a level of sexualization that is present in a large number of commercials in the modern era. It also keeps the same idea of womens' role as housekeepers, who are there to clean the house and reward men for supporting the house, that is seen in similar commercials. Consider commercials for cleaning products that you've seen, like Febreeze or Swiffer; how many of them feature only women (Figure 4)?
It is a clear trend within advertising, and if they continue to produce commercials like these, then perhaps it is working. Once again, this can all be attributed to the precedent that advertising has set, even back to the invention of broadcast television. The Mr. Clean commercial certainly falls into the same scope as many of these other ads, as it's effectively what's expected of them at this point; it is merely a case study in the vast ocean of ideologically identical advertisements.
References
Cleaner of Your Dreams [Video file]. (2017). United States: Procter & Gamble. Retrieved April 17, 2021, from https://youtu.be/ozuWoZITX3Y
Kilbourne, J. (1999). Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt. 488-499.
Kilbourne, J. (Writer). (2010). Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women [Video file]. United States: Cambridge Documentary Films, Inc. Retrieved April 17, 2021, from https://vimeo.com/ondemand/12253
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