Killing Us Softly series, Jean Kilbourne
Advertising is the most powerful arm of the mass media; it is all around us although many of us believe we are immune from its effects. This mistaken belief is one of the reasons it is so effective. According to Sky News the number of TV adverts that people are watching is on the up, with an average of 42 commercials a day per person, new figures show. Almost all commercial media aimed at women are supported by advertising revenue from the fashion, beauty, diet, and food industries, and their survival depends on their ability to please their sponsors. In trying to understand the media’s objectification of women and how it makes us feel, it can help to think of the camera lens as a white male eye. Have you noticed that the covers of women’s and men’s magazines are almost always female? The female stars of mainstream movies and TV shows not only look sexy but often behave in the kind of subservient, helpless way that many men find appealing. The camera eye is usually focused on women who look and act in a way that pleases men; men look (active), and women receive their gaze (passive). As Laura Mulvey has argued the media’s gaze is essentially a male gaze. We are so accustomed to seeing things through the dominant male perspective that we might not even notice the dynamics at play.
The male gaze has objectified women in many ways and women consume what objectifies them for example the Barbie Doll. Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimetres of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhoea and eventually die from malnutrition. (2010 Media Awareness Network)
When we look at how women are represented we often see them as sex objects, placid and fragile. On the other hand men are portrayed to be firm and dominant. We can see this in the Calvin Klein Jeans for women Kate Moss is portrayed topless but looks like an innocent young girl, this can be juxtaposed with the advertisement of Gucci Guilty perfume for men where the Male model is shown a sexy ‘macho man’ by having a female model shorter than him in height and shows she is craving for him. Moreover, in modern advertising, gender is used frequently by advertisers to reinforce patriarchy gender roles. We were all born as a female and a male, but the media has convinced us and has transformed us as women and men. These advertisements show more than just selling products they show semiotics and ideology in them.
I will be testing this by analysing these two still advertisements and comparing the advertisements’ use of codes of colour, dress and shape.
When we look at both advertisements we see that their use of colours are very different from each other, Dior’s advert is brighter with its gold while the Dolce & Gabbana’s advert uses grey, black and white. The color gold shares many of the attributes of yellow and yellow is linked to softness so it associated as female colour. It is associated with wealth and elegance. This could symbolize that the perfume makes you a classy elegant female, which is what maybe showing that this is the perfect women and women should be, it would look ‘unnatural’ for the Dolce &Gabbana advert to be gold or the model to be dressed in gold. Dolce & Gabbana’s use of colours is more firm, and bland, their use of block colours could show that this is how men should be portrayed. We see quite often that women’s adverts tend to be brighter then men’s perfume for example the Dolce & Gabbana perfume for women we can see the use the colour pink while Emporio Armani Diamond for men is shown in Black and White
We could also see the background of the Dolce and Gabbana advertisement has been photographed in a wealthy house by the look of the long curtains and windows. This could signify that by purchasing this product you will live this lifestyle. A strong relationship is allowed to be forged between the ‘signifiers,’ (the photographic image of the protagonist and his wealthy environment) and the ‘signified’ which is the linguistically expressed ‘the one gentlemen.’ Therefore, this could show that wealthy men are the perfect gentlemen, so you would convince women that this is your ideal man and would convince men to purchase this product to have ‘beautiful’ women
Going ahead to the dress code of both adverts, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the Dior model is nearly stripping and shows a lot of cleavage and skin, while the Dolce & Gabbana’s model is fully dressed, women are usually shown everywhere as sexy only when half dress ‘Women are coded as erotic’ Laura Mulvey’ for example in Mr and Mrs Smith both are action heroes and both are portrayed as strong yet Angelina Jolie is always half dressed. If we swap the Dior Model for a fully clothed it would highlight the way her image is constructed merely for visual pleasure yet Dolce & Gabbana’s advertisement appeals to all. Within patriarchy women are often shown for male pleasure. Even her pose could also be seen as very seductive, the grabbing of her dress and revealing her cleavage and just the touch of her earrings is determined as quite sexual. General fashion frequently shows women in postures drawn directly from pornography. Shots emphasize bottoms, or reveal women lying in inviting postures, legs apart’ (Coward 1984: 59) so we could simply just say sex sells. The way the camera approaches the representation of the model, the close up to her chest could also show how sexual the advertisement is, would show that it is natural to strip down and her body is the ‘natural’ look of a women’s body.
Dolce & Gabbana’s model is dressed in a tuxedo, this would signify to many as sexy, elegant, classy and very masculine like James Bond he doesn’t smile with his mouth but with his eyes, his eyes look straight at you dominant, assertive and sexy like a man should be in life unlike in the Dior’s advert the woman looks away as if to show you herself but she won’t look back at you, so her body is more important than what her face is expressing.
Another key signifier that must be considered is the shape of the bottles. Objects have been often used with ‘gender’ roles for washing machines are talked as female. As such shapes take on gender signifiers. In these adverts the bottles used targets audiences differently. The Dior bottle is curvaceous as though to signify a women’s body, you would not usually see a man’s perfume bottle shaped in that way; the Dolce and Gabbana’s bottle is shaped like a square, which is often linked to masculine perfumes for example Allure and Prada.
Historically patriarchy has dominated mass media and women are coded as erotic and men coded as ‘the dominant’ (Mulvey 1975) we can see how semiotics and signs makes us aware of the cultural values with which we make sense of the world. It reminds us that there is nothing 'natural' about our values; they are social constructs, which influences us in understanding what is a ‘women’ and what is a ‘man’.
