“Obey that urge! Do you know that when you get an urge to eat chocolate, you shouldn’t resist—there’s a deep physical reason for it?”—Aero Milk Chocolate newspaper advertisement, 1938
I clearly remember an advertisement for Cherry Ripe chocolate bars that appeared on Australian television when I was a teenager in the early 1980s. A pretty lady dressed in white sat on a park bench eating a chocolate bar while a handsome male stranger next to her magically transformed a bag of cherries into a pink dove. The lady then gave the man a Cherry Ripe bar and they enjoyed eating the chocolate together, before nestling in each other’s arms to watch a bright red sunset. As much as I loved Cherry Ripe, this all seemed very odd. Why did the woman have such an ecstatic look on her face as she took a bite? How did eating a Cherry Ripe land her a boyfriend? Why did the voiceover woman speak in such breathless tones?
I now know that if we trace its sticky history back to the beginning, chocolate advertising has long been intertwined with women and sex, and generally marketed to consumers as ‘Female Food’. From the suggestive Cherry Ripe advert––Australia’s version of the UK’s quasi-erotic Cadbury’s Flake commercials—right back to eighteenth-century posters urging mothers to nourish their children with cocoa drinks, chocolate has been presented to consumers as particularly feminine, but why?
It’s true that women and chocolate have always been deeply connected. In Mesoamerican times, female hands ground the cacao beans to make drinks for the elite, and in the early days of mass-produced chocolate it fell to women in the factories to decorate the confectionery prettily and assemble the charming assortment boxes. Today, women still play a key (and often unacknowledged) role in cacao production, particularly in West Africa. But this doesn’t explain why women continue to be depicted in adverts lolling about, suggestively gorging on bars like mad chocoholics.
It might stem back to chocolate’s very early associations with ‘bad’ women. In the seventeenth century, after Spanish settlers in the New World acquired a taste for chocolate, women rather than men began to be accused of not being able to control their cocoa cravings. In his book, Travels in the New World (1648), English Dominican friar Thomas Gage tells the story of a new bishop in the Mexican city Chiapas who threatened to excommunicate a group of upper-class Spanish women if they continued to drink hot chocolate during mass. The women insisted they needed the drink for sustenance and to settle their weak stomachs, while the bishop argued it disrupted proceedings. In the end, the women ignored his threats of excommunication and chose chocolate over hellfire. The bishop? He died, apparently from drinking a cup of poisoned chocolate.
It’s one of numerous stories that involve women accused of using chocolate for nefarious purposes, including witchcraft. Many testimonies from the Spanish Inquisition hearings in New Spain (parts of the Americas then controlled by Spain) concerned native and ‘mulatto’ women who were said to have mixed chocolate with (often vile) ingredients for the purposes of sorcery. According to the accounts, these ‘witches’ were often hired by upper-class Spanish women to solve various problems. They concocted a chocolate potion that included menstrual blood to seduce a man, or the heart of a crow and human excrement to make a lover fall out of love with his wife. One example from 1620 concerns the addition of human flesh to chocolate––but is frustratingly silent on the intended recipient or purpose of the drink.
“Don Baltasar Pena said… he had found under the bed of one of the mulatto women that served in his household a piece of flesh taken from the quarter of a man that had been hanged, and that she has roasted it and then mixed with chocolate.”
Chocolate was the perfect vehicle for these additives. Readily available and widely offered as a token of hospitality, the drink’s bitterness and thick texture could easily disguise even the foulest flavours.
Eighteenth-century doctors blamed chocolate for the ‘disease’ of ‘hysteria’ they claimed was rife among women in the cities of Mexico and Puebla, particularly nuns. Chocolate had become a staple in religious orders by this time and nuns enjoyed a life of relative luxury, thanks to the wealth amassed by the convents. They could afford to drink liberal quantities of chocolate, which was prepared by their servants and served to them in the privacy of their quarters. So, their love of the drink was blamed for their so-called malady. (Modern researchers suggest the ‘hysteria’ might not have been caused by the over-consumption of chocolate at all. Regulations introduced at the end of the eighteenth century forced the nuns to eat communally, which saw their chocolate intake fall. Was it the slump in chocolate consumption that triggered anxiety?)
By the mid-seventeenth century, chocolate was consumed by powerful rich men in parlours and coffee houses in the major cities of Western Europe. But its reputation as the preferred drink of idle women seeped over from New Spain, reinforced by upper-class women who adopted it as their drink of choice and often enjoyed it in the comfort of their beds. In the late seventeenth century, King William III and Queen Mary II took their chocolate during a bedroom ceremony known as the ‘levée’, when they would dress in front of a chosen few. And paintings like The Morning Chocolate, by Venetian artist Pietro Longhi (c.1750), portrays a woman enjoying her chocolate propped up on pillows in bed, surrounded by a retinue of servants and a well-dressed man. This depiction of a reclining woman indulgently consuming chocolate is not a million miles removed from modern adverts featuring women lazing around on the sofa or in the bath, nibbling pleasurably and indulgently on a bar.
In the nineteenth century, the nexus between women and chocolate split into two paths: one maternal and domestic, and the other romantic and sexual.
THE POWER OF ADVERTISING
Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, cocoa could be produced relatively cheaply and on a mass scale, so chocolate drinks were no longer the preserve of the rich and elite. Drawing on chocolate’s longstanding reputation as a healthful, even medicinal food, manufacturers linked cocoa to a domestic version of femininity, and the Victorian notion that the family formed the moral heart of the nation. Posters advertising cocoa depicted mothers bonding with their happy children over steaming mugs. The message was clear: good mothers nourished their families by giving them wholesome treats. The invention of milk chocolate further strengthened the link between cocoa and nurturing in advertising. In the 1930s, British chocolate manufacturer Rowntree’s introduced its ‘special mothers’ campaign: ‘For growing children, there’s no better drink at mealtimes’, read one caption.
Chocolate advertising reflected women’s place in society. Many women worked outside the home during the Second World War, but when it ended they were expected to return to the domestic sphere. Reflecting this, housewives began to star in chocolate advertising of the 1940s and 1950s, says historian Emma Robertson, in her book Chocolate, Women and Empire (2013). Savvy housewives bought cocoa in pursuit of domestic perfection, the ads implied. In a late 1940s Rowntree® campaign, ‘My Wife’s a Witch’, a woman performs housewifely miracles thanks to Rowntree’s cocoa. Her grateful husband responds: “I picked her for her eyelashes––I never dreamt she was so wizard at housekeeping. D’you wonder I’m spellbound.” This curious, unnerving campaign, harked back to the centuries-old association between chocolate, women and witchcraft.
We can probably blame the mass production of boxed assortments for women being presented as sexual objects in chocolate advertising. Cadbury launched Milk Tray in 1915, the first widely affordable box of chocolates in the UK; ideal as a gift, these assortments were soon aligned with heterosexual romance, sexuality and desire. Rowntree’s recovered from near financial ruin thanks to its ‘letters’ campaign, which positioned its Black Magic assortment (a name that combined a bizarre mix of the romantic and the occult) as a luxurious treat with which men could woo white, heterosexual, sophisticated ladies. The ads depicted women writing intimate letters to each other about receiving Black Magic from romantic prospects. One of the most explicit, from 1934, almost portrays women as idiotic chocolate obsessives: “We silly creatures are always so thrilled when a man thinks us worth the very best. Imagine it, a big box of these new Black Magic chocolates on my dressing table. My dear, each choc’s an orgy.” Up until the 1950s, the adverts conveyed the message that men who gave women Black Magic were an excellent catch.
Manufacturers assumed that women were such chocoholics that a strawberry cream or two was enough to win them over. In 1936, after decades of being outwitted by Cadbury’s campaigns, Rowntree’s launched its Dairy Box chocolate assortment. Designed to be given to women but marketed at men, an early slogan was: ‘She’ll love it if you bring her chocolates, She’ll love you if they’re Dairy Box.’ This was one in a string of chocolate adverts that implied that a boxed assortment was sufficient reason for a woman to go out with a man. Moreover, some ads implied that sexual reward was a given: ‘For Dairy Box I’ll give you a kiss’, one catchline read.
Shifting moral values in the 1960s and more liberal attitudes to sex sharpened the focus on women as sexual objects. Chocolate advertising turned risqué, with the highly suggestive Cadbury’s Flake television commercials the most provocative of them all. These depicted women variously escaping to the bath, skipping through the countryside or ignoring a ringing telephone in order to enjoy a moment’s selfish pleasure with a chocolate bar. They opened the Flake wrapper suggestively and took a feminine bite, whereupon they closed their eyes in pleasure.
Dave Trott, the advertising guru behind some of the Flake ads, confirmed to Britain’s Stylist magazine that the allusion in the advertisement to women having orgasms was intended. “Nothing is allowed to interrupt that delicious, orgasmic moment of self-indulgence,” he said. In the same article, a spokesperson for Cadbury insisted, apparently straight-faced, that although the ads were loved by men, they were actually aimed at women.
Today, drumming gorillas, crazy-eyebrowed children and ambassadors’ receptions feature in chocolate advertising, but the ladies are still there, too. Godiva is a master of the art of the chocolate = sexy woman trope. Its sensual 2017 campaign for the Masterpieces line featured conventionally beautiful women drenched in melted chocolate, along with close-up shots of their lipsticked mouths holding a square between their teeth. Lindt’s advertisement for Lindor truffles is also the stuff of another era: a woman in comfy socks and jumper relaxes on the sofa, seductively eating a chocolate, eyes closed in pleasure. Cadbury recently re-introduced the ‘Milk Tray Man’ ads, which first appeared on British television in 1968. These feature a James Bond-style action man dressed in black overcoming danger to deliver a box of Milk Tray to a beautiful woman, ‘All because the lady loves Milk Tray’.
Is it possible that advertising reflects a fundamental truth that women are somehow biologically hardwired to love chocolate more than men? I don’t think so. Some studies do show a link between gender and food preferences, with red meat appealing to men, and lighter foods and sweets speaking to women. Some experts say evolution explains this: men were the hunters who dragged home meaty protein, while women, who gathered fruit and vegetables, developed a sweet tooth. Really?
A famous US study found that nearly half of American women regularly craved chocolate, compared to just 20 per cent of men. Was it something to do with their hormones? Was there a physiological reason chocolate soothed premenstrual syndrome and heartbreak? No. The study showed that outside the US, the situation was different. In Spain, men and women hankered after chocolate equally, while in Egypt, both genders actually preferred salty food. I think the supposedly female desire for chocolate is just a stereotype reinforced—and exacerbated—by marketing.
Food manufacturers often focus their marketing on women’s guilt about eating, a truth underscored in adverts that show women consuming chocolate in private, away from judgemental eyes. As early as 1698, chocolate was blamed for making Parisian women fat. “Why do Parisians, especially the women, become so corpulent?” puzzled Dr Martin Lister in his Journey to Paris in the Year 1698 (2011). It was partly due, he concluded, to their daily intake of chocolate.
It’s really no surprise that in recent years, manufacturers have come up with new chocolate products––low-fat, low-calorie, low-sugar––that tap into women’s anxieties about their appearance. One expensive bar launched in the last few years even claims to protect women’s skin from ageing and contribute to its radiant appearance. “All the lady things rolled into one,” as one reviewer observed drily. Chocolate’s association with womanhood lives on.