Post #3: Advertising - Janis Mahnure

A woman is an object. That’s what we’ve been told since the dawn of time. We were made for the man. Even biblical stores explain how Adam came first and then Eve was created for him. John Berger in his piece Ways of Seeing says, “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men” (Berger 46). This object is belongs to men; this object is small. These two concepts of being made for men and being small, in a confined space, provides the basis of what the advertising industry perpetuates through sex, beauty, and power.

In Anthony Cortese’s article, Constructing Bodies, Deconstructing Sexism there is an ad with the caption “Quit using our cans to sell yours” (Cortese 50). This is an anti-ad but the necessity of it shows how much the advertising industry uses sex to sell goods- even beverages. We still see this everywhere, even in the video game industry. Grand Theft Auto, for example, is not geared to female consumers – it is geared to male gamers and therefore they place a very sexy female avatar on the cover of the game. Sex is used to sell anything and everything. Business Insider tells us thirty brands that use sex to sell. The first few are obvious from the billboards all over New York City. Just walk into Hollister during the warmer days and you’ll see this concept very clearly: males with muscles and abs standing out front, models inside just saying hello, dimmed lights to create a romantic mood except we can’t actually see how the clothes look, make a purchase and you’ll get a wonderful bag with a sexual image and not much clothes involved. And clothes isn’t the only thing sex sells:

In Sex, Lies and Advertising, Estee Lauder says their products are for “a kept-women mentality” (Steinmen 119). This concept of a “kept-women” basically refers to a women who cares about her body not necessarily in a health-conscious way, more about aesthetically pleasing to society. This society is of course the man's society. Her “beauty” should be “natural” and as Kilbourne says in Beauty and the Beast of Advertising, “beauty is something that comes from without” (Kilbourne 122).  Women are told they are ugly and need to be beautiful. Their artificial beauty is to appeal to the man and once again she is an object to place a mask upon.  A very “natural” mask that comes with a glow. However, beauty does not simply stop at the face. Kilbourne in The More You Subtract The More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size, discusses how normal physiological changes during adolescence result in increased body fat for women but these changes are considered undesirable by the culture. She says, “Imagine, girls made to feel so terrible about themselves that they would rather be dead than fat” (Kilbourne 134). Magazines always tell women to love their body, but make sure to constantly diet and excersize. “Eating for women were a priveledge” (Kilbourne 136). Even food ads promote the notion that women should be skinny. 

Power, or rather, male-power, is used in advertising in the most subtle of ways and most obnoxious of ways. Many advertisements use male dominance to sell even women products. Bell Hooks says that the women’s role is “to serve, to be weak” (Hooks 18). Naomi Wolf in her book Culture says, “Women are mere “beauties” in men’s culture so that the culture can be kept male” (Wolf 59). We see this in the following advertisements:

A women is an object. “Women are allowed a mind or a body but not both” (Wolf 59)

       The pop culture is not reflected by these advertisements – they are just there to show us what pop culture is supposed to be like. They tell us that we should be beautiful and flawless and prance into a bar full of masculine guys who will charm us with their power and authority. In reality, it’s just a Friday night where guys in washed out t-shirts stand outside a club catcalling women or inside watching a football game and women with five inch heels are just trying to have a good time with girl friends or scoring a one-night-stand.

       We don’t need to promote women in negative or subservient light, nor do we need to promote sex to sell clothes. Make ads focused on typography and abstract art design. Make holistic ads that promote family life. Beer ads don’t need women, they can just show a group of men playing poker and drinking beer, good old ‘guy time’. Or a scene from How I Met Your Mother of the friends at a bar making jokes about each other (of course, not have all of the actors white). Make beauty ads that promote “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” and feeling like a temporary princess, not flawlessness. And definitely not have stick-skinny girls – spread some variety, have plus size models, and medium-sized models, and show some flabs here and there. Society feels uncomfortable to see a girl with a few small rolls on her belly but if all the magazines showed it enough times, maybe things would change.

Works Cited:

“Ways of Seeing”- John Berger

"The More You Subtract The More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size" - Jean Kilbourne

“Patriarchy” - Bell Hooks

“Constructed Bodies, Deconstructing Ads Sexism in Advertising” - Anthony Cortese

“Sex Lies and Advertising” - Gloria Steinem Ms. Magazine

“Beauty and the Beast of Advertising” - Jean Kilbourne

“The Beauty Myth, Culture” – Naomi Wolf

Post 3 Advertisement Influences

“Women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.”

-Naomi Wolf     

     This very well written quote is the general message that advertisements send to women. As we all know, advertisements are a common sight in our everyday lives. It can be as obvious as a Gucci billboard or as discrete as a subtle product suggestion in the article of your favorite magazine. Advertisement has a greater purpose than selling products though; advertisement as we know it remains loyal to sexism, racism, and power hierarchies. 

This is a well known ad from the 1960's to promote kitchen appliances. This ad displays a clear use of sexism in advertisement. 

This image is an example of sexism, racism, and power hierarchies by portraying 'the bride' as a prized slave to the dominant male.

     The purpose of the examples above is to reinforce the dominate patriarchal system within the household which is problematic in itself, but I think the bigger issue is that it does so with the disguise of a happy submissive woman/wife. Because advertisements are literally everywhere, the house is no longer a safe place where a woman can use as an escape from the poisonous messages in ads. These messages include instilling the idea  "in consumers the cultural assumptions that men are dominant and women are passive and subordinate” (Cortese 53). 

     The purpose of these ads are to maintain the power struggles between men and women. It does so by oversexualizing women and turning them into objects for men. “Ad deconstruction reveals a pattern of symbolic and institutionalized sexism” (Cortese 45).  “A woman is conditioned to view her face as a mask and her body as an object, as things separate from and more important than her real self” (Kilbourne 122). Pervasive images in advertisements have unintended but highly detrimental effects on women. This relates back to Berger's idea of how “the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (64).  Women internalize this way of thinking as it is represented in the media and as a result the cycle is only perpetualized. 

     “Aggression is a learned behavior. Media violence teaches us aggression as children" (Cortese 67). Cortese suggests that violence is portrayed throughout advertisements. However, learned behaviors via ads is not only limited to violence. The anorexic models that are glorified on magazine covers make thinness the ultimate desire for women although is it unrealistic and extremely unhealthy. The lack of alternative body types make women think that it is even more critical to fit into this literally tiny, tiny category. The images that make it onto covers most often are not natural. “Advertising creates a mythical…world in which no one is ever ugly, overweight, poor...The image is artificial and can only be achieved artificially" (Kilbourne 122). 

     "Authority figures were almost always male, even in ads for products that only women used” (Steinem 113). Changing this would be an effective first step to breaking down the patriarchal society that we are surrounded in. I think that if more women in the advertisement industry are getting a say in how women are portrayed in the media, there will be a greater chance of change. Secondly, the models in front of the camera need to look more realistic and look truly natural as oppose to how men want them to look. Ads “are really projecting gender display-the ways in which we think men and women behave-not the ways they actually do behave. Such portrayals or images are not reflective of social reality" (Cortese 52). This idea of our media being reflective of social reality is key to rehabilitating the advertisement industry because is directly affects the messages being sent to the audience. We should find models that are at a healthy weight and find other ways to pose that do not glorify sex. If there is an abundance of realistic advertisements, that will slowly become the norm. 

      Sources:

     John Berger,  Ways of Seeing

     Anthony J. Cortese,  Constructed Bodies

     Jean Kilbourne, Beauty Beast

     Gloria Steinem,  Sex, Lies and Advertising

     Naomi Wolf, Culture

final project proposal

            For the final project I’m thinking of making a sort of video collage of rape cases from all around the globe. Sexual assault id a huge deal and in many places the victim, the girl, is always blamed. She always has to face the two most ridiculous questions of “why were you there? And why were you dressed as so?” in some places not only are the girls condemned but polices officials are so messed up that they refuse to investigate the case because “she was asking for it.” As if she went up to the guy and told him to rape her.

            Through the video I want to depict the sorrows and struggles of a rape victim. The challenges she faces and the “new” life that awaits her. Good luck to me because I can picture exactly how I want the final project to turn out but I have no clue as to how to go about it.

The Male Gaze, & its complications.

To the man who looked at my ass / To the man who didn’t look at my ass

You had to know I had feelings / Maybe I needed your gaze

This body is not respected or cherished / I am human, and your inability to see me as such hurts

You’ve given me just another reason to hate this body

I’m worth more than the stares I receive

- Safiya Washington & Kai Davis

According to John Berger in his work entitled “Ways of Seeing,” for centuries now, art in the form of female objectification is modeled after the surveyor, the spectator, who is male by default. It is called “the male gaze” – here’s me, looking at you, looking at me. And by me, of course, I mean powerful man with abundant levels of testosterone and desires just waiting to be sated. And now here’s looking at YOU, beautiful [young] woman, full of [sexually explicit] promise and [nonexistent, this is MY show] expectation. Simply flipping through television channels and magazine pages, it is easy to pick up on this notion that media centers around the male spectator.

In a particular incidence about a year ago, I remember mindlessly surfing the web and coming across a music video for Hip Hop / R&B celebrity Drake. The song was “Practice” – a sensuous ode to the singer’s prospective sexual partner, who seems to arduously prepare herself for this encounter – and the video left me quite speechless. The artistic endeavor consisted of a well-endowed young woman, strutting and working it in front of a mirror – evidently “practicing” – to the sultry tunes of Drake, her apparent lover … for the entirety of the piece. In an attempt to find criticism of the work, I was bemused at the lack thereof; however, one review pretty much summed it up: “This is the most heterosexual video made for men containing a song made for women ever made” (Kenny, Rapdose.com). As noted, this video was made purely for the male gaze.

This is merely a more illustrious and explicit form of the male gaze penetrating our media culture. But when I watched this video, I not only criticized the male distributors/viewers, I also questioned the model in the video – what attracted her to do this? What does she believe she had to gain from this experience (besides money, minimal [pseudo?] fame, and a few moments with the celebrity)? In the above spoken word piece by Safiya Washington and Kai Davis, the young women perform the two sides of the female as surveyed coin – the dichotomy of what Bell Hooks coined, the oppositional gaze. 

On the one hand, the woman feels vulnerable to the stares from men and frustrated by their lack of understanding. On the other, the woman feels ignored and ashamed of her incompetence to attract the attention the aforementioned woman so keenly wishes to avoid. The oppositional gaze is a challenge to the male gaze; women viewing themselves beyond the eyes of men and deconstructing these overtly sexual images construed by the media. However, although the male gaze may breed frustration and combative notions, it also breeds insecurity and a false sense of self. To think that a woman such as the one in the video feels like they need to expose themselves like that - thrashing “dat ass” around for attention and validation - is heartbreaking. Although not as severe, I myself am well acquainted with both sides of this coin: the “just let me be” side, and the “why won’t you look at me?” side. Ultimately, as the poem says, for myself and for the women in the media: I am worth more than the stares I receive.

On a lighter note, I’ve enjoyed my recent discovery of the reversal of the male gaze and just how ridiculous it can be in retrospect. I feel I am lucky to recognize just how compromising much of today’s media’s portrayal of women is. Personally, I intend to fight these notions of passivity, naivete, and objectification. It’s nice to see I’m in good company.

Nailed It

Here's Lookin' at You Guys

Post №2

The culture I grew up in was based on one principle: everybody in a family listens to the man. He is the one who provides, makes important decisions, the one who is respected, the one who is loved or feared. Woman’s function in the family is to take care of the man and kids, clean, cook, make everybody happy and look pretty. I remember very clearly getting an advice from my grandmother regarding relationships with the man: “Listen to everything he says, agree and smile, but then do it your way. Most likely he won’t even notice”. In my grandma’s generation women were subordinated to men. And looking back there it is great to see that women started to look for alternative ways to achieve what they wanted. However, we still don’t get enough images of women presented as independent individuals with bright personalities and strong characters in our modern culture.

Berger describes an idea of the male gaze as the way women are presented in art like objects created for men to look at. Their only mission is to satisfy spectator’s appetite who is always a male (Berger, 55). He states: “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another” (Berger, 46). Therefore, women’s appearance always comes first for themselves and for everybody else who look at them.

Laura Mulvey talks about woman as image and man as bearer of the look that represented in cinema (837). Women – passive, men – active. It is unbelievable that this exact pattern appears everywhere we look at – movies, books, magazines, TV commercials, and it is so common and so normal that nobody really cares. However, it is hard to deny that it influences our minds, thoughts, wishes and opinions, shapes our values and morals. Skinny, but with abs, with fit and nicely shaped arms, legs and butt, with perfectly styled long hair and big eyes – this is an ideal woman of media, Victoria’s Secret model. This is the image that so many girls and women are looking at, struggling with diets and being constantly unhappy with their own bodies.  

It is also really upsetting that in a diverse American culture we still see racism in the media. Misrepresentation of black women and men started long time ago with the shows like “Amos ’n’ Andy” (Hooks, 117). Even nowadays we see the wrong images of different races in the movies that create really strong stereotypes. The majority of popular women magazines have white women on a cover. And if we see a black woman, it is such an absurdity, that her skin and hair have to be photoshoped few shades lighter than in reality.   

 Article 

 

We all know in order to make your life easier and more enjoyable you should accept yourself and love yourself the way you are. But it seams almost impossible because we receive hundreds and thousands of media messages daily that are aimed to brainwash without us even realizing it and make us buy products that we don’t even need. So we can feel better about ourselves and get one step closer to beauty and perfection. The minimum that I could do in order to avoid this unlimited source of crap I did long time ago – I stopped buying women magazines.

Ways of Viewing

 From the earliest collection of history women have always been represented as sexual beings. One of the earliest artifacts collected from Lower Austria is a sculpture of a woman figure called The Woman of Willendorf  also known as The Venus of Willendorf. The artifacts was said to be made around 24,000-22,000 BCE. Many critics have written that it is a symbols of fertility and sexuality. By emphasizing on her sexual organs such as her breast and her vagina the artist takes away attention from other features gaining the male gaze.

The male gaze is the believe that all advertising/marketing viewers are men, the believe that women are objects. John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, "One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relations of women to themselves." (Berger, 47) The way women are depicted in medias such as magazines, runways, movies and more has caused social, physical and emotional damges to women all around the world.

  

All around them women are seeing images of women looking a certain way and are lead to believe that one might only achieve certain things by looking that certain way. That one might only get a man's attention if you are slim, clean faced, young and provocative.

In her book Black Looks: Race and Representation, Bell Hooks speaks of the "oppositional gaze." This oppositional gaze can be said is the rebellion to the male gaze, although in her article she is speaking of how black females and blacks are representing in the media. She writes, "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality."

If more women give this oppositional gaze maybe we will stop being seen as sexual objects and this ideal look of how every woman should look will be vanished.

Shaun Persaud- Saturated Society- Post #2

The idea of the male gaze is one that has been slapping people in the face for many years in popular culture, though very few are able to see it because it is constantly reinforced in the media we consume on a daily basis. The Male gaze is the idea that men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women see themselves as being looked at” (Berger 47). To simplify this further; there is a way men should act and women should act, but the way in which women act is solely dependent on men and is taught from early childhood and reinforced throughout life within the media that society is saturated with on a daily basis.

Berger believes that these behavioral characteristics have always been reinforced in media. He goes as far back European oil paintings and the birth of nude depictions. In these paintings he makes the realization that there is a difference between the act of being nude, versus the act of being naked. He asserts that if a woman is depicted as naked, there is a certain quality of shame within the painting, which alludes to the fact that the woman is made aware that she is being seen. However a nude exists only when the woman is naked but feels as though she is alone, or perhaps does not seem to care that she is being seen. In these paintings the power lies within the woman and the male gaze becomes null and void; “She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her” (Berger 50).

Once she becomes aware of the gaze, she can be made shameful of it, or own it. It is here that the power structures begin to change. As seen in the paintings, which can be considered early forms of media, the gaze controls the acts of the subject within the frame, but this is only if the subject of the painting allows it to be so. As already specified, the subject alone decides if she is naked or nude depending on how she controls the gaze. If she exhibits no shame, she is nude. If there is a hint of shame, she is naked. So, there is power within the gaze, but there is also power within the subject to negate this gaze. This is called the “oppositional gaze”

                           

In her piece on the oppositional gaze, Bell Hooks makes the assertion that “there is power in looking” (Hooks 115). She goes on to catalog the moments where as a child she would get into trouble when staring long and hard at adults and upon being scolded would be told to “Look at me when I talk to you” (Hooks 115). It is in those moments where she realized the immense power of the stare; the moment where a person “defiantly declares: ‘Not only will I stare. I want to look to change reality.’” (Hooks 116). This is precisely what the subject of the paintings would do to control how they are seen. If they wanted to appear naked they would be shameful and look away from their intruders. Conversely, if they were nude, they would own up to themselves, and their state, and look upon their intruder, welcoming the gaze. This is a moment of negation; the male gaze becomes null and void.

All of this is true, yet there still seems to be an alarming number of television programs, magazine covers, and personalities that seem to have accepted the male gaze and continue to perpetuate it in modern society. Personalities like Kim Kardashian, Kate Upton, and innumerable lingerie models all accept the male gaze and use it to their advantage. While this may be considered an oppositional gaze because they are taking control of the gaze to a certain extent, they are still controlled by the gaze in an even more powerful way. Yet these are the women that young girls aspire to be, and it is because of this that the male gaze will continue to live on in a never-ending cycle where little boys and girls are encouraged to act a certain way to fit into a society saturated with images they are meant to emulate.

Kate Upton Cat Daddy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avx8Z7U2MwY

The Answer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl85RG1kRTY