In 1988 I wrote a jokey piece in the advertising industry magazine Campaign inventing a pressure group, “Min against Advertising” – “min” because “men” were tired of being a diminutive of “women”. We were going to take to the streets with banners shouting: “Min Are Rather Cross About All This.” The joke rested on the absurd notion that men would seriously consider starting a pressure group to fight for their rights. I might as well have called it something equally farfetched – Fathers 4 Justice, say.

It was in that decade that we saw the first signs that advertising was beginning to dish out the same “objectification” treatment that it had to women for years. Nick Kamen did a strip act in a laundrette for Levi’s and a row of watching women. The Diet Coke man was ogled by female office workers. This was a new world, a sea change from the Life on Mars-like philosophy of living that had lasted for generations, then disappeared quicker than European communism.

Under this hoary old regime, men told women what to do; specifically, buy things – more specifically yet, FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods). In the millions of hours of 30-second FMCG spots over the decades, women were portrayed as powerless and panicky creatures whose lives were transformed by the deus ex machina of a male voiceover telling them that their kitchens would be cleaner, their clothes whiter, their lives made complete if they only switched to this washing powder or that floor cleaner. In the 1970s, after the publication of The Female Eunuch, the genre was just shaky enough to get parodied by smart comedians. The best parody was in The Goodies1976 show String, in which the three male stars, all fat ties and wide lapels, repeated the mantra: “Bless her little cotton socks – where would we be without her?” In the flash offices of the real advertising industry the language was less sweet. The standard FMCG set-up – two housewives discussing rival products – was universally known as “two Cs in a K”. Need I spell it out? Look away if you’re easily offended, or work for Camden council: it meant “two c***s in a kitchen”.

As for the products aimed at men – well, if I tell younger readers that an ad for St Bruno tobacco showed a crowd of attractive women following a man, Pied Piper-like, through a town because he smoked a pipe, you will realise that this was indeed a different world, and that Gene Hunt in Life on Mars ain’t the half of it. (In the end frame, the tough bald bouncer employed to protect our star lets one of the lucky pipe-groupies through the crowd.) The Guardian’s women’s page began a column, “Naked Ape”, to document the more gobsmacking examples of sexist marketing. Naked girls astride power tools was a regular favourite.

There may be some ageing ad-men who still talk of Cs and Ks: if so, it’s a miracle that they have kept one step ahead of the HR department enforcers for so long. But glass ceilings are made of tough stuff, and women are still in a minority. So to compensate, the men who make ads have been engaged in a 20-year campaign of grovelling to female consumers. I call it the dorking of men. The editor of Loaded, Martin Daubney, put it another way. Advertising, he said, has turned men into “castrated dweebs”.

When I conjured up the preposterous notion of a pressure group concerned about sexist representations of men in advertising, men were still very much firmly in charge of the agencies and the strategies that they put out. Lori Miles, who moved from editing newspapers to working at an ad agency in the late 1980s, says that Fleet Street sexism was mild compared with the kind that she encountered in her Covent Garden hotshop. “I survived the rigorous sexism in the old Fleet Street – it was much more in the Benny Hill style,” she says. “But in the advertising industry the sexism was more abusive and malevolent. One of the directors grabbed a young girl’s breasts with both hands as she was carrying a tray of drinks and couldn’t move.

“The female executives were just as bad. I was told by my boss, a woman, that I should go to the management floor and apologise to the MD for becoming pregnant. I was sacked the day after we had resecured one of my accounts, on the premise that the company didn’t employ mothers.” That same agency now has a female chief executive.

By the Nineties, however, the agencies were changing, and so were the ads. First we saw the advent of sensitive new man, cradling babies and being modestly heroic. Then we began to see the new power-dressing women hitting back. In one ad a female manager marches into her boss’s office and snips the balls of his executive toy, a Newton’s Cradle; he winces, and we are meant to laugh at an image that you could never, ever show with the genders reversed.

I don’t recall the brand, but I do remember thinking that something fundamental had changed in the world as witnessed in the ad breaks. This was a cry for help from a dying macho culture, and nowhere had that culture been more exaggerated than in the agencies themselves. Today they’re more right-on than the average student union, and have names like Mother. Even the language has changed: according to Campaign, “macho, warlike terms such as targeting, objectives, strategy and campaign have been joined by a more emotional set of terms” – which raises the question of whether the magazine itself should now change its name to something less “warlike”.

With their executive toys mutilated, the admen turned into the dweebs and the dorks. One memorable slot, for the Prudential, featured the actor Mark Williams, who later starred in The Fast Show. “We want to be togetha,” he said soppily in his cardigan, while his sassy Scouse girlfriend in her sexy black dress raised her eyebrows to the camera. This was also the beginning of rampant “accentism” in advertising. You got a double whammy if you could find a dork who also spoke with a Brummie voice. Witness the whingeing West Midlander speaking the words to the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby? on a petrol station forecourt in a 2002 ad for the Fiat Punto.

It was the Fiat Punto, too, that showed the new stereotypes: sassy, sexy, female who takes the car for a wild drive while doltish boyfriend lazes around in bed. She gets it off with a third stereotype – sexy Latin man who doesn’t, and possibly can’t, speak. Diet Coke man and Nick Kamen couldn’t speak either. Their pecs were the point of their existence. But The Guardian didn’t seem inclined to start a column defending their rights.

The Punto ads prove that it’s on the road where the battle of the sexes, and the sexists, is at its most intense. The planners knew what they were about. Zippy small cars are designed for women, making them feel independent and “one up” – not one up on their friends or bosses, but on their men. Big male cars such as Audis and BMWs, meanwhile, are promoted as Ultimate Driving Machines and technological thrusts forward (“Vorsprung durch Technik” – you can’t imagine that being said in a female voice, can you?). The ads are deliberately depopulated and dehumanised. Perhaps it’s because, faced with a choice of available male advertising role models – the hunks, the hopeless or the hapless – they thought it safer to stick to the metal. Or perhaps because it’s difficult to portray a BMW driver who won’t be loathed by 90 per cent of the viewing public.

The hapless and the hopeless are everywhere on our screens. It might be James Nesbitt coming second-best to the Yellow Pages, or Kris Marshall bumbling through family life for BT. In the empowered world of TV advertising, women aren’t allowed to bumble. Even those still stuck in the kitchen during the daytime TV shows look as though they are about to take a G8 conference by the scruff of the neck.

Apart from the blokes who run Loaded, Bravo and other unrepentant lads’ outfits, men have suffered their dweebing and dorking in silence. We did have things our own way for quite a long time, seems to be the attitude. Not so their girlfriends and wives, who are becoming frankly bored of seeing blokes incessantly portrayed as incompetents and ninnies. As one very successful female friend put it: “Believe it or not, we quite like men. I don’t see all men as being like that. It’s bad marketing to go so far away from our real experiences.”

One advertising planner, Jane Cunningham, told Campaign: “Men and women are hardwired differently. They process information differently and have different behavioural default settings. The smarter brands have already started to recognise this.

“There is huge creative potential in the differences between men and women. It provides fodder for creating realistic character and dialogue, as well as differentiated and properly relevant brand positioning.”

Marian Salzman, a serial predictor of marketing trends, is busy promoting the successor to the metrosexual. Her sarong-wearing sweetie is being elbowed aside by the “über-sexual”, an uncompromisingly masculine type engaged in a relentless search for fine and stylish things. David Beckham morphs into Daniel Craig and Jeremy Clarkson finds himself preaching to the converted.

So here’s the message of the modern advertising industry: bless everyone’s cotton little socks. Long live our different hardwiring and opposing behavioural default systems. And the min don’t have to march on Soho after all.

Grunting, dimwit, male stereotypes alarm fathers

In a smart bar lissom, single women sip cocktails and contemplate potential mates. The prospects do not look good, however, for the men in the bar aren’t men at all – they’re pigs. This was the premise of a recent US advertisement for that nation’s market-leader condom brand, Trojan. The punchline came when one pig trotted off to the gents, bought himself one of its products and was transformed back into Homo sapiens. Ads such as these have led to an increasingly strident protest at the way that men are portrayed in the media.

According to Paul Nathanson and Katharine Young, two authors at the heart of the movement, the advert exemplifies the growing phenomenon of misandry: hatred of men. They insist that misandry is now pervasive and that we should be every bit as alert to it as we are to misogyny.

They argue that men are now routinely defined by a limited set of negative stereotypes: the man as fool, slob or irrelevance. And they contend that nowhere are these archetypes more apparent than in advertising.

But is it really of concern? “Ask women why they thought it was a problem when they were ridiculed,” says Nathanson. “I don’t think men and women are different in that respect. Do two wrongs make a right?”

Left unchallenged, he says, these images take on the patina of truth that will seep into the minds of those who implement laws and develop policy.

One man making a stand is Glenn Sacks, an American journalist whose newsletter reaches 50,000 subscribers. In 2004 he was alerted to an ad for Verizon. It showed a father trying to help his daughter with her maths homework only to be humiliated by her and her mother.

Sacks, who has a son and daughter, says: “The worst thing about it was not that it shows the man being an idiot, because we see that all the time, but seeing the man portrayed as an idiot in front of his daughter and ridiculed by her mother in front of his daughter.”

He says his campaign prompted 3,000 people to contact Verizon and the ad was pulled.

But what most concerns Sacks, Nathanson and Young is the potential impact on boys growing up surrounded by images that tell them there is no acceptable or dignified way to be a man.

“If you just have a bunch of negative images, how are boys ever going to develop a positive image of themselves?” says Young.

Sacks is appalled by the Trojan advert, and concerned about the message it sends to boys such as his 14-year-old son. “A boy looking at that would think that men are just inferior, disgusting animals and have to change and jump through hoops in order to be as good as women.”

Like Nathanson, he doesn’t believe that these stereotypes stay locked harmlessly inside the TV. After a sex education class at school, his son complained, “It’s always the boys who are wrong; boys who are trying to put one over on the girls,” – “and they get this drum beat,” says Sacks. “They are just fed a steady diet of this.”

Dan Bell