Male Gaze

Sex Sells: The Male Gaze in Advertising

This week’s reading by Debra Merskin (2006, p. 202), asks the question that is clearly on everyone’s mind: ‘Where Are the Clothes?’ The text explores the sexualisation and pornographication (my spell check agrees that this is a made up word) of modern advertising, and its secret agenda to ‘maintain the sexual subordination of women’ and keep us men thinking of them as sexual objects. While this short little introduction might paint me as an anti-feminist, I assure you I’m just trying to have some fun here. Merskin’s article radiates with the ‘us vs. them’ feminist mentality that is used to make themselves feel victimised.

Merskin (2006, p. 203) contends that ‘female identity in advertising is almost exclusively defined in terms of female sexuality’, which is almost impossible to disagree with as we are constantly bombarded with sexual advertising. After all, ‘sex sells’. This reminds me of a scene from the Simpsons where an attractive woman is posing in front of a car that can be won in a competition, after Homer puts his competition slip in the box he asks her ‘Do you come with the car?’, she giggles and the next man in line puts his slip in the box and asks her the same question.

This Simpsons scene, though comical in nature, hints at the not so humorous reality of advertising that Merskin discusses. Is the woman selling the car or is she selling herself? Obviously the car, but it seems that men typically associate the two things as being one in the same, they think that by owning the car, it’ll eventually attach itself to beautiful women. Merskin (2006, p. 203) states that this is due to modern advertising being more involved in selling what the product stands for rather than the product itself.

Merskin’s article is centred on the idea of the ‘male gaze’ which is defined as the way men look at women in a voyeuristic fashion. The way men look at women with lust and animal desire goes against the grain of society, so men attempt this gaze without being caught. As humorously pointed out in an episode of Seinfeld, where Jerry says that ‘Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun, you don’t stare at it. It’s too risky. You get a sense of it and then you look away’. Modern advertising has clearly decided to cash in on this risky and frowned upon male gaze by making hyper-sexualised images of women available everywhere and on everything, for men and women to look at without risk of shame or embarrassment. I’m sure these days even cooking magazines will consist of a few teaspoons of sexually suggested images.

Sex

The above Calvin Klein jeans commercial of Brooke Shields in the 1980s is a perfect example of the duality present in modern advertising. In the commercial Brooke Shields is shown putting on a pair of jeans whilst talking about genes and ‘selective mating’. Even though the ad is about jeans, and the word gets said a lot, it is actually talking about genes, natural selection and sex. This is the typical formula of modern advertising, the duality of selling both a product and sex at the same time. Merskin’s article rightly exposes an issue of concern in modern advertising for its role in normalising the sexualisation of women. But the author may be over exaggerating its danger when she contents that rapists should not be the target of assault prevention, but the media for its portrayal of women as sex objects (2006, p. 213) . Should we point the finger at violent movies instead of murderers as well? I conclude that there is validity in Merskin’s article and her contention that advertising focuses itself too much on female sexuality to sell its products, but I don’t necessarily agree that these advertisements can be considered to be pornography, nor do they exist solely to maintain the subordination of women.

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