"The notion that ads convey meaning about gender without viewers’ awareness is not new. In his influential Gender Advertisements, Erving Goffman (1979) argued that advertisements symbolically reflect social-cultural constructions of gender through displays of posture, positioning, facial expressions, and social roles: Sitting at a man’s feet (ritualized subordination), gazing off absently (licensed withdrawal), or gently caressing an object (feminine touch) all demonstrate women’s inferior status. According to Goffman, however, we fail to recognize the sexism in these images precisely because they reflect our unexamined assumptions about gender. Nonetheless, these gender displays allegedly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Despite the complete lack of empirical evidence showing that these images promote sexist beliefs or attitudes, Goffman’s analysis is widely accepted by scholars, who regularly employ his taxonomy of gender displays to establish the prevalence of sexism in the media (e.g., Belknap & Leonard, 1991; Kang, 1997; Krassas, Blauwkamp, & Wesselink, 2003; Lindner, 2004; Millard & Grant, 2006; Plous & Neptune, 1997)."