KEY POINTS:
Foreign visitors lured by advertisements highlighting New Zealand's natural beauty instead find themselves bombarded with images of rugby players performing like drag queens and female sports stars hawking appliances and healthy food.
That is the finding of Waikato University management lecturer Fabrice Desmarais, who studied hundreds of commercials recorded over a seven-year period to explore how gender is portrayed in New Zealand advertising.
Mr Desmarais, a Frenchman, found of 967 commercials recorded between August 1998 and October 2005, 176 (18 per cent) used sporting imagery, making it a dominant theme.
Of the sports-oriented commercials, 69 per cent featured men exclusively, with 6 per cent showing only women. Five of the 11 women-only advertisements related to netball.
While violence in sport tended to be glorified in many cultures, "brutal images of rugby matches and hyperbolic visions of the male muscled body is particularly noticeable in New Zealand", he said.
New Zealand advertisements were full of over-developed men performing "impossible feats" such as bench-pressing a truck "or possessing the ability to move into space like rockets".
Mr Desmarais also interviewed 16 Chinese and Malaysian visitors to New Zealand, who were unimpressed by heavily gender-oriented advertising that they said was at odds with what promotional advertising had told them before their arrival.
Mr Desmarais' findings are published in a book, Gender and Embodiment, and at one point liken New Zealand rugby players to transvestites.
"Here we see an excessive masculinity, where the macho rugby player [seems to be] a drag queen, parading excesses of machismo in the same way that the regular [drag] queen parades extremes of femininity."
Female sports stars were characterised by their "femininity, attractiveness and sexuality" when they appear in commercials, and appeared "relatively powerless" when compared with men, he said.
Olympic champ Barbara Kendall was used as an authority on washing machines rather than wind surfing, while former Silver Fern Bernice Mene "was valorised not for her sports performances ... but as a role model promoting cosmetic fitness and acceptable eating behaviour to other women" when she appeared promoting a brand of frozen food.
That one advertisement showing her receiving a phonecall from her father asking if "his little girl was looking after herself" was too much, Mr Desmarais argued.
"The patriarchal voice appears not only to interrogate Bernice, but also to ask the commercial's women viewers whether they, too, are looking after their bodies, and whether they are good models of cosmetic fitness."
Advertising Standards Authority executive director Hilary Souter said the hyperbolic portrayal of sports stars' physical abilities was "not commonly raised", as most complaints related to the objectification of people, "particularly women".
The advertising code of practice allowed clear exaggeration in commercials, she said.
Ms Souter was not sure what effect such advertisements might have on foreign visitors.
