Sexualised portrayal of women in mens

magazines
A synopsis
Ria Jethi
Roll No- 856
Lady Shri Ram College for women
Delhi University




























Fashion, clothing, and dress are signifying practices, they are ways of generating
meanings, which produce and reproduce those cultural groups along with their positions
of relative power
-Barnard, 2002
Fashion in the media, particularly in advertising, may communicate the roles men and
women play in life, how they are to look, and who they are to be as people. Ewen and
Ewen (1992) write, The image, the commercial, reaches out to sell more than a service
or product; it sells a way of understanding the world. They argue that visual
communication, especially through advertising, creates a cultural language, which helps
shape society.
Constrained and enabled within specific socio-cultural milieux, gendered performances
of masculinity or femininity are always implicated in historically contingent and
intersecting symbolic and material systems of sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ableness,
and age. Masculinity and femininity then remain ongoing gender projects
Gender roles and biases are created and idealized in magazines, as well as in television,
movies, the internet, newspapers, and countless other formal and informal media
channels and vehicles. Idealized notions of womens bodies may become cultural ideals
for sex appeal, even fetish. Beyond gender roles, it is important to look at the sexual roles
women play in advertising, particularly fashion advertising, because sexual imagery of
women is so pervasive.
Less well studied but noted is the growing presence of homoerotica in metrosexual mens
magazines and their advertising (Kolbe & Albanese, 1996; McRee & Denham, 2006;
Soldow, 2006). Savvy marketers have increased the use of subtle and not-so-subtle
homoerotica as well as androgyny and sexually ambiguous homosociality to appeal to
lucrative gay markets without losing straight ones (Bordo, 1999; Kay, 2009; Kolbe &
Albanese, 1996; McRee & Denham, 2006; Smith, 2005; Soldow, 2006; Stern, 2003).
Following Lambiase and Reichert, this dissertations objective is to examine the
sexualized representation of women in fashion advertising found in mens metrosexual
magazines. This dissertation project is purported to argue that, in the mens magazine
fashion advertisements I am going to examine, sexualized images of women function do
not promise heterosexual sex but certify heterosexual manhood. Instead of offering up
sexy women as rewards for purchase or consumption, this sexist and homophobic
advertising logic positions sexually active women as signs proving metrosexual
masculinity as straight. I have used Reicherts definition of sexual content, who defines
sexual content in advertising as: (1) models nudity or stage of (un)dress; (2) models
sexual behavior and pose, including gaze and physical contact/interaction with other(s);
(3) models physical beauty or attractiveness; (4) sexual referents, whether material or
innuendo, including those facilitated by advertising production and post-production
techniques; and (5) sexual embeds targeting the subconscious.
My first chapter gives background information on communication process and elaborates
on how sex is used in advertising. It further discusses the types of sexual information in
advertising and objectification of womens bodies in advertising. It provides a review of
the ways sexual content has been analyzed in the advertising and mass communication
literatures (e.g., nudity, suggestiveness, physical attractiveness), including a brief
summary of the ways the effects of sexual appeals have been studied. I have supported
my argument by giving examples of popular advertisements of Davidoff, Pepe Jeans,
Polo Sport, Bailey and Durex to illustrate the use of sexual appeals in images.
The second chapter, first narrowly focuses on two representative Absolut Vodka ads from
the 1990s, then telescopes to a much broader discussion of fetishistic images used in
contemporary advertising. It explores how advertisers create powerful and positive
images for their products via fetishistic themes, in order to build theory about the ways
such images create cultural meaning. Further, among the descriptions of the idealized
male form as it exists today, the second chapter asks provocative questions, such as,
What are the effects of mens images? What is the ideal mens image? Who consumes it
and with what effect? In so doing, it provides a foundation for understanding the
increased prevalence of men as objects in sex in advertising.
By treating the visual communication in sex sells fashion ads in mens magazines as
rhetoric, the third chapter looks at how these images work to produce persuasion. The
method of analysis adopts Mullen and Fishers (2004) visual analysis process, which
Mullen and Fisher adapted from Foss techniques for visual rhetorical analysis (Foss,
1994; Foss & Kaengieter, 1992). The themes used to select the ads for this thesis include:
A) lack of clothing or very little clothing; B) the gaze of models; C) body position; and
D) body language. This method was chosen so that the present study would have
representation across all four themes. The goal was to obtain a variety of visual elements
that would put each ad into at least one thematic category, even though some overlapping
does occur.
In the final chapter, I have tried to weave together similarities and locate dissonances
within the chapters to provide questions for future research and challenges to existing
research. I conclude by discussing the studys strengths and weaknesses, as well as
direction for future work.
Advertisements tell about our societys current, past, and possibly future culture; they
also suggest how individuals in our culture choose to represent themselves (Barnard,
2002). Society takes its cues and forms its culture from a variety of sources, and
individuals strive to conform to the norms set by the culture. Media images may even
help shape our fashions and sexual desires because what we see in the media often
becomes what we consider normal (Berger, 1991; Watson, 1998).
According to Williamson (1978), people are made to identify themselves with what they
consume. Thus, fashion can be considered a part of what we consume to create
ourselves. Advertisements and their imagery have the ability to show you a symbol of
yourself aimed to attract your desire; they suggest that you can become the person in the
picture before you.