the strange world of advertising

"advertisements guide thinking, action and behaviour as people come to accept mainstream ideas through visuals. The most crucial of these is what it means to be a man or a woman. Ideas about how to feel, dress, look and behave, and how to interact with other men and women is the bedrock of culture in which we live."

so to help me a little with my visual journal and my visual outcomes, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the world of advertisements, and ones specially aimed towards a male audience.

I feel like the main theme within these three ads is mocking women to empower males and making them feel like the more dominant sex. I noticed there was a huge amount of adverts aimed at males belittling women, and it seems to be quite a recurrent theme within advertising. I definitely think this sort of thing is where a lot of the gender stereotypes have stemmed from, and continue to do. I think this sort of message has become a sort of joke now, but jokes aside, why should a whole group of humans be degraded just to please another?

this one is pretty self explanatory. shut up, yorkie 

The main themes of these ads are undoubtably dominance and power. This is apart mainly from the stances and how the men are posing with the females. The way each of the women are shown lower down, with the men above them looking down on them is a clear indication that the man is in control, and that the women is the inferior. 

"The varied dimensions of posture, position of bodies, location of body parts, height and depth of figures, all suggest that women are inferior, and men are superior" Scott A. Lukas

Something else that seemed to keep cropping up, was the idea of women being used as sex objects within advertising. Through a bit of research, its evident that sexualising woman to draw the audiences attention to the object being advertising is considered an effective sales tactic. I think something I need to research on is whether this actually works, does sex sell?

so these are a couple of adverts more directly related to my theme, I sort of knew there were going to existing adverts using women to advertise mens power tools, and I guess I was right. I didn't even realise it was possible to sexualise a power tool, and especially in a serious way as mine were intended to be more of a mock take, but it looks as though it is.