Group 2: Gender and Ads

How gender representations in advertising can degrade women mentally and physically.

How do advertisers utilize gender to sell products? How does this affect women's perceptions of themselves and of their roles in politics? How is technology used to convert images of real women into images of unattainable fantasies? Why do advertisers do this, and who have they sucked in?

www.genderads.com 

Adele Blasts Musicians Who Use Sex To Sell Records

To read more click: Adele Blasts Musicians Who Use Sex To Sell Records

Just read this article about the great Adele not giving into exploiting herself to sell more records. Thought it was perfect to share this on the blog given our past (and current) discussions on the female spectacle and body image.  While the article makes the connection that Adele's remarks comes after Lady Gaga posted photos proclaiming a "body revolution," I don't necessarily Adele's remarks where in response to that per se. I definitely agree with Adele's belief, yet I also commend Lady Gaga's initiative to raise awareness about media scrutiny of female celebrities bodies and the effects it has on female body image.

If nothing else just an quick read about Queen Adele who could totally take over the world if she wanted to. Just saying.

War of The Gazes

The MALE GAZE imprisons women – it objectifies us, uses us, and turns us into prey.

Throughout mediums (television, movies, ads, music videos) there is usually one thing in common: women’s bodies are selling products. They are being posed in sexual, disturbing, offensive ways in order to grab the consumer’s attention and sell the product – even if the product is something as mundane as a sandwich.

 

 

This sexual portrayal of females is the MALE GAZE. It is perception through the eyes of a man.

By the way it says: 8 AIRBAGS ...really?

 

Since the beginning of time, women have been treated inferior to men. Men have always had the power – and one result of this may be the images we now see. During the birth of propaganda men were the ones in top positions, therefore they were the ones in charge of what was advertised. They were also the main consumers. This explains why most media is focused on male “interests,” such as the female body. Of course, years later, we have progressed (a little), and women are now capable of being in top positions as well. They now have the chance of having say in what gets advertised, and are also consumers. However, I believe it is a routine of habit the reason we still see these sexist ads. Even in selling women products, females are portrayed through the MALE GAZE.

 

 

 

Fortunately, the OPPOSITIONAL GAZE has surfaced to challenge the MALE GAZE. According to Bell Hooks, the OPPOSITIONAL GAZE was created when females realized they could not identify with the women in the media. More specifically, the OPPOSITIONAL GAZE began when black females could not relate to the white women in cinema, or to the stereotypical black female counterpart. For example, Bell Hooks mentions Sapphire’s character. She was created to represent a stereotypical black female both blacks and whites could hate. However, black females related to her and therefore embraced her (p120). They challenged the media by doing so. The OPPOSITIONAL GAZE allowed black women to “critically assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator.” In turn this challenged “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” (p122-3).

 

Using the OPPOSITIONAL GAZE, women can take control of how to react to the images we see in the media. By using the MALE GAZE to present products, the media is suggesting women should always be this way (to young females and males alike). However, being aware of this advertising strategy will aid us in blocking this nonsense out.

 

Until recently I felt the need to be thin and “sexy,” to reveal my “female” attributes whenever possible, because I thought it would make me attractive. I was obviously brain washed by the media from a young age. I was always a huge fan of Disney’s Jasmine and Pocahontas, as well as Barbie, and even with those characters you’re presented with a fake image of what a girl is supposed to look like: perfect breasts, thin, small waist, and accentuated hips.

 

Slowly but steadily, I’m coming to realize being a woman isn’t all about being objectified by men. All it takes is awareness to take the first step in the right direction.  

 

 

For one last DISGUSTING image, I share this with you:

 

I have no idea how this was even let out in public. It is overtly sexualized, and even the model's face isn't pleasing. She looks disturbed, scared, maybe even drugged? I'm not even sure, all I am sure about is THIS IS NOT GOOD ADVERTISING UGHH!

Source:
Hooks, Bell. "The Oppostional Gaze." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992

 

Fashion & Women

http://vimeo.com/49957948

Presentation 1

For anyone interested in fashion and how the women can help change the way fashion industries portray women so that media can make the changes as well, there are web links on page 2 of the presentation.  If a young adolescent can make Seventeen Magazine change it's image or at least take a step in that direction then I believe change is possible.


Fashion and Media

Fashion and Media PDF

WHAT IF WE WERE BLIND?

What kind of society would it be, if we were blind? How would society work if humans lost the sight sense? Maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about appearances. One big issue that our society faces is the “male gaze”. As John Berger tells us “men act” in society (Pg.47), he makes his own path, he has come to define the aesthetics of our society.  It is the power of the male scrutiny that makes women “play” an act to its viewer, the male surveyor. I believe throughout eras women have developed an “artificial instinct” to be surveyed of herself to the surveyor. We live in a world of images. Most of our information enters through our eyes, and we haven’t learned to “read” these images. The problem comes when the images are used for a power structure to persuade and control a way of living. The American culture, in my opinion, bases on consumerism, the idea that we can buy happiness. We, women, are seduced visually, and as the surveyed need to please the gaze.

One example I try to explain myself is Marilyn Monroe. She was the most objectified female during the 50’s. She became to be a symbol, an icon, an example to women to how they should look and act. Until this day she still is. From her body to her personal life, girls become saturated with her “made up” essence. What it intrigues me is that we all know she internally suffered due to the male gaze, and despite her suffering we see her as a martyr of beauty.

The alternate to male perspective is the female gaze. It is our saying. We become the surveyor; it is the reclaiming of our representation in the visuals or within ourselves.  In the video we saw in class, Bell Hooks mentioned that criticism is a tool to find one self. She encourages critical thinking to not conform with what is given to us. “ It is this critical practice that enables production of feminist film theory...” (Pg.131).

Using the example of Marilyn Monroe, she became to be an alternative to size zero models. Although I am still undecided weather she is a healthy alternative, knowing that the male gaze brought her to us. There is a thin line we can get caught up in the nonsense of typecasting. I feel we should accept and love the fact that some of us are born (biologically) thicker than other or thinner.

In my experience, my single mother was my surveyor.  I grew up without a male model in my life, so I came to experience the male gaze outside home. It was frightening at first although I forced myself to find alternatives as a survival skill. In high school I let photography speak for me, a silent expression I saw as comforting.  Years later I found myself working with fashion photographers for my income. I got to see the manipulation of computers on bodies, the ego trip and, why not, the art of wardrobe. It opened my eyes to the industry and to our society of images. I still find myself being seduced by the “exclusiveness” I can get working in the field. Although I decide I want to be part of the oppositional gaze and give alternatives to other women. I wont let my self-discovery (critical practice) rest.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972. Print.
Hooks, Bell. "The Oppositional Gaze." Black Looks: race and 

 

What does she see when she looks in that mirror?

She walks into the bathroom, climbs onto the toilet and opens the medicine cabinet to look at herself in the mirror.  This FIVE year old girl is already thinking about the way she looks, applying make-up and asking if she looks pretty.  "A woman must continually watch herself.  She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself" Berger says in his book Ways Of Seeing (Berger. 46). Media's impact of the male gaze is so strong even in a five year old innocent little girl who does not truly interact with media as we might.  The only form of media she utilizes is PBS-kids and the music her parents listen to in the car.  However, somehow someway she managed to fall victim to this gaze.  Looking in a mirror, asking if she looks pretty, applying make-up to hope that she appears to be as pretty as so and so.  Even if media is not absorbed by someone directly, it is absorbed by peers which convey the message.  "There is power in looking." (hooks. 115)

The male gaze is pervasive in that it is objectifying us.  We are not humans, not equals we don't play on the same field.  Images of women on magazines are airbrushed to look like what men wish truly existed and they could have.  Women in video games do not even remotely look like the average women, they are portrayed in a sexist light as well because this helps sell the games as well.  With that in mind when men look at the average woman it is always at a specific body part.  It makes us self conscious in a way that we start to think, are we pretty enough to be looked at or are they internally laughing at us.  Women suffer from immense pressure to look a certain way, ways in which most often our bodies could not possibly handle.  We are told big boobs attract men and so women get implants.  Now all the rage is buttocks and so women get butt implants or pads.  When do we as a human being see ourselves as that and not as a woman that needs to look a certain way.  When does it matter what we have to say or how we act and not what we look like?

This is where the oppositional gaze might be a way we take back our power.  bell hooks speaks about the oppositional gaze as a way in which black slaves rebelled against their white masters or even their parents.  It was the way they were able to rebel and sometimes escape their life on a plantation.  However, her statements such as the one that says the oppositional gaze is a way in which we can assert that we too can look but also that we hope that our look can one day change reality (hooks 116).  Though her piece speaks mainly to the black woman I believe that for feminism to continue to prosper we must not separate the races.  I do believe that it is important criteria that we use to distinguish individuality and culture but women are women are women and I believe we all want the same reality.  I don't wish to criticize her work but her piece spoke to me in such a way that it was saying that white women wanted to be the nude, they wanted to be gazed at when we do not truly know this.  Were white women abused by the gaze? yes.  Were black men given a reprieve through art to have a gaze? yes.  Did they continue to produce art in a way the white artist did, thus exploiting black women as an object and not a person? yes.  And so were black women abused? yes.  We need to be UNITED.   In the image above can you see how the black woman looks to the white woman as if she is saying "bitch look what you started, now I am being objectified because you couldn't stand up for yourself"


Women must stand up and become spectators.  We must have a voice, we must be able to speak to society and tell them who we really are, that we are not an object.  Black women and men as well need to stand up and be able to tell society who they really are.  Media outlets like the movies and advertising portray women as object and black men and women in such a negative light that does not even relate to the general public at large.  We need to take our lives into our own hands, take our lives back.  One way would be to stay away from the Hollywood movies that show us in a negative light.  Another way would be to produce media that shows us in a positive more true to life light.

Thought I can openly admit, maybe I shouldn't, that I am not an open feminist.  I have been raised to work for everything i want.  Never use my body or womanhood to get ahead.  However, from this class I have seen that it is because the radicals that define feminism in a negative light that caused me as well as other women to not want to associate it.  These women that created such a bad repertoire is possibly the reason why we are still objectified.  Black men and women continue to even portray themselves in the Hollywood way to make money and so it continues to keep the truth from being something that we see as reality.  They say the truth will set you free, we need to set ourselves free.  I can say that thought I probably will not stop indulging in some movies that will continue to will objectify me I am more open to watching movies that give me a voice, humanize me!


Sources:
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972. Print.
Hooks, Bell. "The Oppositional Gaze." Black Looks: race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992: 115-31


Kim Kardashian image
super heroes posed as women
Lara Croft
black and white women

Male Gaze, Women Watch

The male gazed is defined as how a man approaches a woman, in what and which ways. Sometimes male gaze can be seemed in positive way. For example, when a woman walks down the street a man can stare at her because is beautiful and appreciates her beauty by saying “you are beautiful”.  However, there are times male gaze can be seemed in negative ways, like male disrespecting a woman by calling her “sexy, banging, etc.” These female assaulting names can affect the way a woman look at her; she can take it positively or negatively. Male stares at women as if they have all the powers and they were born with this power to stare at women that way, but the truth is our “society” has had given men this power to gaze at women that way. Women are exposed in public sexually and they have become the sex sell and sex symbol. We see images of women just wearing bras and panty in the ads of buses, and posters. Women are exposed so much to the public that men approach them as “sexism”. If women were more secure about their body being exposed in the public, television, and images men would have not approach them the way they do it nowadays. 

In Berger’s article “Ways of Seeing” he states “Men looking at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47). So, women were perceived as an object to men that can be viewed at anyways positively or negatively. Once an overweight young woman tripped and fall in the ground, I overheard a man saying “If she was a beautiful woman, I was going to help her get up, but since she is not attractive I don’t care”, it’s amazing how some men would make that statement about an overweight woman that way.

Look at this image and think for a second, who is in control here the male or the female? By looking at this image, it seems like the male has the control over the female. The male here representing the sexual power he has over her. While he stares at her with his man power, she looks down to him bashfully.  In Mulvey, Laura article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" she states, “She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized” (840). The female on this image is just a sexual object that is representing the male. Laura Mulvey as states that, “..the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified”( 840). Women are always shown to be very well mannered, dress neatly, and always look attractive around men, and when it comes to men one really judge them of the way you dress, and present themselves. 

When I watch music videos, where girls dance half undressed it gets me angry and disappointed watching these girls have no self-respect for themselves. Why is it that women are always known to take off clothes and seem to be stripers, when men have their clothes on and all they do is dance around these women? It always makes me think; don’t women have their respect towards their body? It’s funny how our society has given so many rights to the women, but women are still seemed to be the object. According to the article, Ways Of Seeing Berger John states “ …Charm to the man whom she imagines looking at her”(55). These models possess at the camera as if they are posing for men that way. 

Media has made women and men the way they are today. Everything that is related to media: movies, shows, music videos and other entertaining things are all about women being the center attention, while men are just being men. Women have to have a beautiful dress, makeup and be gentle for the viewers to compliment them. When it comes to men, it really doesn’t matter they just have to be attractive and that makes the viewers like them. In the article “The Oppositional Gaze” Bell Hook argued, “Woman as image, man as bearer of the look”, women have to present her best looks to be fame and men are to present these women to the audience being the “passive” male character.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972. Print.

Hooks, Bell. "The Oppositional Gaze." Black Looks: race and Representation. Boston:     South  End Press, 1992: 115-31

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. NY: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-844