Eli Rezkallah, the 31-year-old creative director of Plastik Magazine, shows through the print advertisements of the ’50s what happens when gender roles are reversed in a sexist world.
The artistic project titled „In a Parallel Universe” is a fictional advertisement series created using the sexist print advertisements of the Mad Man era.
Starting from the ’50s, the Madison Avenue advertisers eagerly showcased the Perfect American Family in their advertisements. However, the female-male relationships depicted in the ads were based on a distorted hierarchy of subordination and superiority. At the bottom of the hierarchy was the weak, flawed, and somewhat silly woman, while at the top was the perfect, brilliantly smiling man. In this universe, the woman is presented as a household robot, whose task is to make her husband and family happy. The visual world of the advertisements and the humorous tone of the texts were humiliating and degrading for women: some ads even canonized spousal violence. More about the sexist advertisements of the Mad Man era can be read here. You can read it here.
Eli Rezkallah, a creative professional from Beirut, created his astonishing and thought-provoking concept using these print advertisements: he only swapped the roles presented in the ads. In this parallel universe, women carry male attributes, while men appear as vulnerable and helpless, clearly illustrating the absurdity of the original advertisements.
The idea for the project was born at a dinner. The artist visited his family in New Jersey during Thanksgiving and witnessed his uncles discussing the role of women and the duties associated with those roles. Eli realized from the conversation that this attitude is no different from the sexist mindset of the '50s: today's society is still deeply intertwined with gender role-based discrimination.
Does the project fulfill the goal articulated by the artist, that „men should also taste the poison of sexism”? Although the portrayal of men is clearly feminine, the advertisement series fails to convey the confident, irritating superiority that radiates from the original ads. The reinterpreted advertisements are much more amusing than shocking, making the project an experimental play.
