They advertise, You buy!

The media has always found ways to captivate their audiences; by narrowing down to their ideal target they then attack the weakness. Why is it so hard for the public eye avoid feeling some kind of reaction to the multitude of material objects which is constantly promoted every which way one looks. The answer to this question is simple, the consumer is forced to feel like they should become the ideal in the scope of the media which is truly unrealistic when compared to what woman are in "the real world". The media finds a ways to make the women in the public eye to force a sense of dependency over the viewer which will essencially lead to the consumption of their product or artist or idea and so forth. If something is promoted in the media, no matter how random, no matter how unneccisary, no matter how ridiculas someone will be interested. Why? Because they come in a varitey of different sizes, shapes, designs, textures, scents and all that other jazz. It's whats in! It's what the rest of the class is wearing! It's the upgrade of the phone I had a month ago, but this one loads 2 seconds faster! Oh my goodness! Do we not see what's taking place all around us?
It seems that some women has lost some sense of being an indivisual because she is trying to be someone she is not. It typical for a man to say that a woman takes hours to get ready, and I never believed this until I meet a girl who literally was a different person after an hour in front of the mirror. If one strand of hair was out of place, it was not acceptable. "Are you serious! We're just going to the corner store! It's not important!"
I call this putting on the mask. The mask is what you wear when your in a social setting when one is all dolled up and the rest of the world admires. The is nothing wrong with looking good but there are extremes. A woman should be able to dress herself up but for themselves rather than others. Here is where the representations of gender come into play. Advertisment has found a methods to grab your attention and make you stare. Goffman in 1976 said that "Advertising has a great deal to say about gender identity. Ads use visual images of men and woman to grab out attention and persuade. They are really projectiong gender display-- the ways in which we THINK men and women behave-- NOT the way they ACTUALLY do behave." The notion is that woman are labeled as objects and they sell for major companies, by exploiting the womans body and completley making them seem like nothing more, they become dependent of the extrenal beauty which is superfical and could even become extreme.
How do we change what is out in the media and make the message not one of downfall but one of insperation and uplifment? We promote what woman really are. The normal woman walking down the street does not have the measurements of one in a magazine. Lets get some woman with curves in the media and have show them eatting with a smile on their face. If I'm sitting on the train after a long stressful day, why do I have to see the whole left side of the train car covered with alchoal ads, so that I turn to a bottle and drink the pain away? Why is it that on the Lexington line I see ads with poems and on the Brooklyn line its nothing but ads promoting vices. The media knows who they want to target and they find where the money is; this is where they push their product.
There are problems in this world which are completly neglected. Survey woman worldwide and see what is really important to them. We live in a day and age where woman are very liberated and their interest have changed, there should not be a representation of passivity when instead we have the power to tell the media what they can do for us!

Eye Candy

Mulvery tells us that the male gaze is when a woman is not seen as a human being but rather an object which needs to be observed. There is clear evidence of this in popular culture; movies, music videos and advertisements all play their roles in portraying woman as sexual objects and nothing more. For any product there is always a target audience, you find that targets weakness and you expose it to entice them purchase from you. The media found what makes men spend, sexy women. What do they do get custumers? Budweiser’s ads are a wonderful example, along with the trademark name they throw in a voluptuous female wearing only a bikini, in the ad above they improvised but read closely on her leg, it says "You can twist anything into a swimsuit." In the ad along the side, the womans make the label, symbolizing that they come as a package deal. So Budweiser, are you telling me that if men buy your beer, woman in bikinis will come running to cater to the big spender? No! Budweiser if they can’t get woman like the ones in your ads when their sober, a beer will not change their luck. “…the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man.” Now what if Budweiser hired me to make an ad for them, I’d expose reality. There would be a before and after: man sitting at the bar, across from him sits an average woman he pays no mind to her, after a few beers he gazes over at the same female and now she looks like the girl in the ads.

Sex will always sell! Men are not ashamed to gaze and woman as well are conscious and also judge the woman in the eye of media in one way or another. We are so exposed to sexual images we don’t even think twice about the who, what or why. A woman would think: Who is this woman? What are her interests? Why did she make this career choice? For men only the physical is relevant: Who are you and where have you been all my life? What do I have to do to speak to you? Why do you not want me like I want you! The 1988 film Who framed Roger Rabbit stars Jessica Rabbit who leave both men and cartoons in a trance. She is a sex symbol in the animation industry and children are not even aware that they are being exposed to the beauty of a womans body.

The gaze is a way of making someone else ashamed, Bell Hooks in Oppositional Gaze tells how white slave owners would use the gaze to punish by instilling fear into the African Americans. “Afraid to look but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in the look.” There is deep truth in this. I work with children and I always give them “the look” as a warning and it always works! For me the gaze is the power of the eyes to communicate through unspoken words. Every day I am exposed to the male gaze. I get on the train and there is will some guy that is violating me with his eyes. The funny thing is they want you to see them looking at you, they show no shame. Even our president was caught gazing at something that he could not have, its human nature to feed into something as intising as "eye candy." These silent words speak to me every day and they make me want to be invisible. I am aware of the male gaze, before it would make me feel shameful but now I use it as power. A man can no longer hurt me with their gaze because I know I am not an object. Men will always look and I have seen myself being looking at. I feel as though I am rambling so I am going to let Hooks speak for me, “… I thought again about these connections, about the way power as domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanism of control.”

The Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey's definition of the male gaze is, in my understanding, the perfect female figure as seen in a man's eye; the female partially nude figure is supposed to play on a male's fantasies and keep them drawn or hooked. Today's media is riddled with perfect examples of the male gaze. We only need to go as far as mellow pornography on cable channels such as Cinemax or HBO to see some examples. On these channels, the male gaze comes from the director's perspective and his (or her) choices in editing. The male gaze in this case sees the entire female body nude, whereas male frontal is completely left out.

John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" sets up Mulvey's definition by explaining to us what women in paintings, photography and pronography do, and how they are portrayed to make what we see, truly, a male's gaze. Berger gives examples of paintings and portraits which portray women in certain poses that would catch a man's eye and arouse his fantasies. He also uses a scientific approach to one painting to say that the woman's body is asymmetrical around where the blanket covers certain parts of her body (p. 16). In this sense, my belief is that the male gaze has been set up and conditioned in us, so much so as explained by Berger and Mulvey, that even women seem to have it.

Bell Hooks then introduces us to the Oppositional Gaze, which she defines as an "overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire" in black people. She also attributes the word resistance to the gaze saying: "Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that 'looks' to document, one that is oppositional." The images of resistance and opposition give backbone to Hooks' gaze as she argues for black people what Berger and Mulvey argue for women: The gaze is instilled in our minds to look at something which we define as beautiful and attractive.

My understanding of these structures is that in today's media, we see women as sexual symbols or objects drawing the male to gaze at, for example, a magazine or television advertisement with an anorexic girl sprawled across the cover or screen, respectively. The oppositional gaze is also apparent in black entertainment, which Hooks either praises or discredits depending on who is behind the production of anything black-entertainment-related: She will support something written and produced by a respected black person and discredit something advertised as black entertainment by white writers and producers.

At this point in my life, I feel I have become too numb to let anything affect me when it comes to relating with people in various media. I feel we are being thrown many things and ideas and opinions from all directions, peoples and walks of life, that one cannot be blamed for becoming short, numb and sometimes emotionless.