This essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, first released in April 2023. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument, examples, and critical perspective.

Nike presents women who challenge the limits imposed on them. Always transforms “like a girl” from an insult into an expression of confidence. Dove features women of different ages, appearances, and racial backgrounds while questioning narrow standards of beauty. Across global and local advertising, images of passive homemakers and decorative female bodies have increasingly been challenged by representations of women as strong, independent, ambitious, and self-determining.

This change did not occur spontaneously. It followed decades of feminist criticism directed at media and advertising. Yet the relationship between feminism and advertising remains deeply contradictory. Feminism is a critical approach that questions historically produced inequalities between women and men. Advertising, by contrast, is a commercial practice intended to promote brands and encourage consumption. Feminism asks us to question the social order; advertising generally prefers audiences to associate products with attractive meanings without questioning too much.

How, then, did these seemingly opposed forces come together? And can an advertisement ever be fully feminist?

When the Personal Became Political

The relationship between feminism and advertising becomes clearer when placed within the history of feminist struggle. First-wave feminism concentrated largely on women’s legal and political rights, including suffrage, education, property, and civil equality. From the 1960s onward, second-wave feminism widened the field of political struggle by insisting that “the personal is political.”

Experiences previously treated as private matters—domestic violence, the exploitation of women’s unpaid household labor, sexual harassment, rape, reproductive freedom, and abortion rights—were redefined as political problems. Feminists argued that the household was not outside power. It was one of the main places in which patriarchal inequality was produced and normalized.

Media representation was not initially treated as the movement’s most urgent concern. At a time when violence against women was widely accepted as a private family matter, the image of a woman in a short commercial could appear secondary. During the 1970s, however, feminist scholars and activists increasingly recognized that media images were more influential than they had assumed.

Advertising does not simply reflect society. It also helps shape society by repeatedly turning particular relations into familiar stories. If women are continuously shown as weak, emotional, dependent, and confined to domestic work, while men appear as rational breadwinners and heads of households, these differences begin to look natural. People who encounter such images from childhood may internalize them as common sense.

Feminist criticism made it possible to identify these representations as sexist. Today, calling an advertisement sexist may seem ordinary. Before this critical vocabulary emerged, however, images of women cooking, cleaning, caring for children, and obeying male authority were largely regarded as unremarkable depictions of everyday life. Feminism changed not only individual advertisements but also the way audiences learned to read them.

Advertising Responds to Feminist Criticism

During the 1980s, Black feminism added another important dimension to this critique. Writers such as bell hooks argued that mainstream media was not only sexist but also racist. Advertising was dominated by white lives, while Black women were either absent or confined to stereotypes. The category “woman” could not be treated as uniform because women’s experiences were also shaped by race and class.

By the 1990s, more Black women and men began to appear in mainstream advertising. Women were also increasingly represented as workers and as sexually active individuals rather than passive objects. These changes occurred within an industry that remained male-dominated, but the industry was nevertheless responding to feminist criticism.

This response did not mean that advertisers had suddenly become feminists. Feminist ideas were gaining visibility and influencing public expectations. The people criticizing sexist advertisements were also consumers, and brands could not remain indifferent to their reactions. The transformation of advertising therefore had an important market dimension: feminist criticism had become socially influential enough to create commercial consequences.

The changes of the 1990s did not resolve the problem. Two contradictions were particularly visible. First, advertising often presented women as sexually liberated while continuing to commodify their bodies. The formula that “sex sells” could repackage objectification as freedom. Second, the newly independent working woman was still expected to perform traditional domestic responsibilities. She could have a career, but she also had to remain the primary caregiver, homemaker, and ideal partner. Instead of reducing inequality, advertising sometimes added new responsibilities to women’s existing burdens.

The Rise of Femvertising

The term femvertising—a combination of feminism and advertising—became widely used during the 2010s. It refers to campaigns that challenge conventional gender stereotypes and present women and girls as empowered subjects.

Always’s 2014 “Like a Girl” campaign is one of the best-known examples. The advertisement asks adults and young people to run or throw “like a girl,” revealing how the phrase becomes an insult as children grow older. It then reclaims the expression as a sign of ability and confidence. In Türkiye, the campaign circulated through Always’s local brand name, Orkid, making the message familiar to Turkish audiences.

Nike has likewise produced campaigns centered on women who resist restrictions placed on their bodies and ambitions. Its Turkish campaign Bizi Böyle Bilin—presented internationally as This Is Us—showed women participating in sport while challenging expectations about femininity, appearance, and appropriate behavior.

Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign responded to criticism of the beauty industry by presenting women of different ages, body types, racial backgrounds, and appearances. After decades in which beauty advertising imposed whiteness, youth, and physical perfection as norms, Dove claimed that women should be recognized as beautiful without having to conform to a single ideal.

These campaigns represent a meaningful departure from older advertising. Women appear as active subjects rather than passive homemakers or sexual decoration. Advertising can therefore contribute to cultural change by making alternative forms of femininity visible. Yet femvertising does not bring the relationship between feminism and advertising to a satisfactory conclusion.

Three Continuing Problems

The first problem concerns the term itself. Femvertising did not emerge from feminist scholarship or activism; it came from the advertising and marketing industries. The label turns feminism into a recognizable commercial category and allows brands to use its language as a positioning strategy.

The second problem is the illusion that sexism in advertising has already been overcome. Highly visible empowerment campaigns may suggest that feminism has won and that the industry has left its older conventions behind. Yet many advertisements—especially those for cleaning products, food, kitchens, and childcare—continue to reproduce traditional divisions of labor. Celebrated examples of femvertising coexist with a much wider advertising culture in which women still carry domestic responsibility.

The third problem is the limited diversity of the women represented. Advertising does not always reflect the ways womanhood differs according to class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, age, disability, body, and appearance. A general message declaring that “women are strong” may still imagine only a narrow kind of woman.

This is why intersectionality has become an important next step in feminist criticism of advertising. It asks us to examine how gender interacts with other identities and inequalities rather than treating all women as if they shared the same experience. An advertisement can challenge one sexist stereotype and still exclude many forms of womanhood.

Femvertising should therefore be understood as an important but incomplete transformation. Its rise demonstrates the success of feminist criticism: advertisers can no longer assume that sexist representation will pass without objection. At the same time, the commercial use of feminism can create the false impression that the underlying struggle has ended.

The question is not simply whether advertising now contains feminist images. We must ask what kind of feminism those images express, which women they make visible, and which inequalities they continue to leave outside the frame.