Sociologist Erving Goffman spent the 1970s cataloging how advertising poses men and women differently, and filmmaker Sut Jhally builds this film around that archive, pulling hundreds of print and television ads apart frame by frame. Women are shown reclining, touching themselves, or glancing away from the camera; men stand upright, grip objects firmly, and look straight ahead. Jhally argues these are not neutral choices but a visual code so consistent it functions as a ritual display of power, repeated so often that audiences stop noticing it. The film moves through decades of campaigns, matching stills against Goffman's categories like "the feminine touch" and "licensed withdrawal," and lets the repetition itself make the argument. Interviews and narration connect the imagery to broader questions about how commercial culture teaches people what masculinity and femininity are supposed to look like. Produced by the Media Education Foundation, it plays less like a takedown of any single ad and more like a slow accumulation of evidence that the pattern is everywhere once you know how to see it.