Part Bad. That’s Man’s Essence.” The intended message of the ad appears to be that if men use Axe Essence body spray, they will attract sexy women in lingerie, and will lust for those women over their ordinary girlfriends. By being able to attract such beautiful women by using the Axe Essence body spray, men will feel better about their self image, have better relationships, appear to be more successful in life, and therefore be more happy and content. An ideological analysis of this advertisement reveals that there are unintentional cultural messages embedded throughout the ad, one such being the sexualization of women. This Axe advertisement shows the sexualization of women by emphasizing the extreme sexuality of women and how it attracts all men.
Daniel Resultan Professor Steve Fried English 151 1837 16 March 2012 Cupid’s Scent Are you a guy struggling to find the woman of your dreams? Don’t you just wish you could have hundreds of model quality females chasing you because they are sexually attracted to you? The question is how this can happen in real life. Axe advertisers help answer this questions with their commercial for Axe body spray. It’s sometimes a problem for guys when it comes to meeting women.
In this essay I will discuss how the “male gaze” is still very prevalent in contemporary modern culture using advertising, the cinema, music videos and magazines to confirm my views. Traditionally imagined, written and produced by men, advertisements have long depicted women as men want them to be, sexy, obedient, fragile, instead of as they actually are. In this way, the male gaze is very predominant in modern advertising. John Berger put it in Ways of Seeing: “Men ‘act’ and women ‘appear’. Men look at women.
TO: Joe Boss, Supervising Editior CC: FROM: DATE: September 11, 2012 SUBJECT: Gender Analysis of “Lucky You” Ad Introduction Looking at many different magazines, newspapers’, billboards, and internet websites you scan across many types of advertisements that are trying to sell a certain product or make a certain point. They often single out what types of people they want to attract to the ad. Often, they are gender specific ads meant for males, females or both. Many of the ads attract the viewer’s eye by producing the ad in a sexual manor. Many of the sexual innuendoes in the ads are meant for the male population.
“The construction of gender stereotyping of both males and females in the media is based on outdated and unfounded beliefs and therefore has had and continues to have a detrimental impact on society.” (Yes!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUyfD1F7k1I Women are subjected to many stereotypes in today’s society. Movies and television shows suggest that all women are airheads, whose sole purpose in life is to please men and rear children. Magazines and other advertisements push photographs of very slender, over groomed and “sexy women” into our minds. Men’s magazines write articles on how to seduce a girl into sleeping with them.
The producers of Old Spice advertising utilize many rhetorical tools to make successful ads. In Old Spice’s Odor Blocker advertisement with Terry Crews, the rhetorical tools they use throughout help to sell the product, but also in a way distracts the viewers from what the product really does. Terry Crews, former NFL linebacker, now comedic actor, is used for this commercial to represent the hot, masculine image which Old Spice
I agree with Sheets-Johnstone’s claim that “women inspire male sexual desire simply by existing.” In the twenty first centuries, targeting western culture, women are constantly examined by men based alone on their outward appearance. A woman can be reduced to only to certain body parts such as the genitalia. This is because a woman’s appearance alone can cause a male to become aroused which naturally leads to this kind of degradation. The woman as a whole is basically forgotten. Because it is common for men to behave in this manner, it is almost routine for a woman to be appeasing to a man for approval.
While looking at the front cover, I had an eerie feeling that cosmopolitan focuses mainly on women providing the best sexual experience for men. Some of the articles read as follows, “What he wants to see during sex”, “Sex Survey” and “25 Fun, Free Dates”. It came to me that women are seen as an item. This brought me back to the “Women and Body” power point, where it describes the media’s messages of the body being that “women are shown as sex objects in magazines set up for the male gaze”. Details on the other hand, seemed to focus on looks on this specific issue.
As noted earlier, failure to conform to these media images, results in persons regarding their bodies negatively and developing low-self-esteem. (Russello 2013) claims that both men and women are confronted with pressures from the media to conform to society's attractiveness ideal. The study points out that man are not pressured to be thin, but to be muscular. The media exposure has been shown to elevate men’s concern about muscularity, fitness and overall body satisfaction. Rusello further states that the handsome man always gets the beautiful woman and this places pressure to adhere to society’s ideals of what is attractive and what is not.
Around the world, history has shown that men have long regarded women as their inferiors and treated them with disrespect. However, today, we are facing a new generation where people are no longer categorized according to their gender and their narrowly defined gender roles. Although commercials have attempted to portray stereotypical images of women and their gender roles, this paper shall seek to prove that commercials are still far behind in being a social indicator of women’s societal roles. Sensual Images Provocative visuals of naked womens' bodies or scantily clothed women are prevalent in commercials. Movie analysts suggested that women are pictured as ‘objects of male gaze’ (Aronowitz as cited by Klein, 1993) and this statement is clearly proven in commercials.