Objectification of Women

The objectification of women and the male gaze in advertising

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”

This is a quote from a book by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. She wrote a book called ‘Visual and Other Pleasures’ which was written from a feminist perspective and was first published in 1989. 28 years later, you would think the media world would have moved on from using the female body to sell a product, right? Right?!

WRONG!

This advert released by Lynx is a clear example of how we are still displaying women as sexual objects in order to sell a product to a particular demographic - heterosexual men.

If we take a look at the advert and think about how it has been designed to grab the attention of the targeted demographic, we understand that it is blatantly using the female form to sell the product. The women takes up the majority of the left hand side of the poster and she is the largest thing in it, taking up an equal amount of space as the information on the right. She is young, slim and of the appearance that is considered attractive by the mainstream media industry and the fact that the company has chosen to have a women like this on their poster shows that they are trying to appeal to the phantasies of men, with the caption “The cleaner you are, the dirtier you get” further feeding the idea that if you buy this product, you will be able to attract women like her - basic premise of Lynx’s whole advertising campaign.

Objectification is the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object and in the media industry it is often the case that women are objectified as sexual objects possessed by men. Undoubtedly, this affects everyone, no matter their gender - men can be objectified too, as well with the pressure of being considered less of a man if we don’t see women in this light, which is equally as damaging- however it is undeniable that throughout history it has been women that have faced sexual objectification the most. This is because by objectifying something, we feel that we have power and control over it, which is throughout history the roles that men and women were expected to fill - men being dominant and women being passive.

The dawn of modern technology, such as cameras and editing, was the dawn of a new language - a language created by men for they were the ones who created all of this new equipment and therefore the ones who invented the codes and conventions of it’s usage. The camera was always from a masculine, heterosexual point of view which is were the phrase “The Male Gaze”, coined by Mulvey in 1975, comes from, for because of this perspective, it presents women as objects of male pleasure. For example, the camera may focus on aspects of the female body in order to emphasise her as a sexual object to the audience. Unfortunately, this method of catching people’s eye is still in use today, prominent in advertising in order to sell products to the straight male demographic.

But objectifying each other as sexual objects is harmless and not damaging to society at all, right?

WRONG! We’ve all grown up in a world that has told us that value of a person is based off of their looks and sexual appeal, which is specifically directed towards women, but affects everyone. It degrades human beings to just our body parts, which is insulting and disrespectful to every single person because we are so much more than our appearance. It skews society’s views of men and women because it builds false expectations of how we are supposed to be - that we should look and act a certain way and if we don’t match up to these ideals, we become dissatisfied in ourselves and how we look, which in the end leads to insecurity and feeling inadequate. Unfortunately, because women are presented in the media industry with the sole purpose to be looked at, it also makes some men think that it's acceptable to think of women like this in the real world, which goes to show the impact that media has on society and that this impact is often harmful to how we treat each other.

#sexism #feminism #objectification #malegaze #women #LauraMulvey #representation