Race to the Top

Abstract

This article focuses on the myth of hegemonic masculinity in the context of discourses of gender, sport, and nature in advertising, with reference to Der Spiegel, the leading German news magazine, and to Dav Panorama, the largest European mountaineering magazine. The article considers commodity advertisements that employ masculinist sports metaphors (in Der Spiegel) and contrasts them with others designed to sell a range of outdoor sports equipment and/or to promote the idea of sustainable human interaction with the natural environment (in Dav Panorama). Advertisements targeting affluent men are critically discussed, and the symbolic codes of masculinist aesthetics—visualizations of the desire to “conquer” all social constraint—are highlighted. Sports metaphors of all-out competition are compared with broader, less masculinist concepts of sport and nature to underline the ideological character of promotional constructs produced to exploit men's—and women's—fears of failing within a social and cultural order dominated by men.