What is important to note is how advertising deals with these issues of similarity and difference in its representations. Regularities, generalizations, and even patterns of variation in the images advertising constructs emerge from this exercise. Such an investigation constitutes the first analytic step. In addition to assigning attributes to people, advertisements also depict social relationships. What emerges from this second question is an understanding of the ideas about appropriate and idealized social relations in which people in the other constructed category operate.
Advertising first defines the category, but it quickly moves to place it in a social context.
As with the first question, this second one is most productively applied to a number of advertisements rather than just a single one. From the second analytic step comes an understanding of ideologies of social relationships that advertising constructs. Equality is not precluded as a possible message in the discourse of advertising. Rather, it is simply the case that most messages are about dominance and subordination, about power and submission to it. The contradictory representations that strike us as unusual - of men preparing food for women, women proposing social engagements to men, of women making sexual advances to men merely confirm the general and usual messages.