Today we re-covered the Gaze theory and looked at some of the images from the PowerPoint presentation.
Looking at this image we said the women is actively engaging the audience but is happy to be viewed. She is looking at her reflection which connotes this fact that she knows she is being viewed. We said these paintings were the norm because at the time artist were always men. Men painting images of naked women for other men who could get voyeuristic pleasure from this. The cultural structure at this time was patriarchal meaning men had the power and the money to be the consumer. Dominance and power being created through this humiliation of the 'nude' women.
The 'nude' was a term used in the time of the creation of these styles of paintings which writers
used as justification of naked paintings of women. The writers generally spoke and created an idealisation of the female body. objectifying women's physical appearance.
This is where the normalisation of women being viewed as an object began.
We compared these two image:
We said the differences in the two were the fact the first is passive and the below is active. The women in Cabanel's is covering her face and being submissive and subservient.
The second image shows a prostitute actively engaging the audience. This was controversial at the time because of the idea of the women being more powerful and less submissive. Yes you can have sex with her but you have to pay and any other man can pay. This is reinforced by the gifts and the flowers. The women is looking straight at us as well as defensively covering her genitals.
The bottom image is similar but with slight alterations and attention to details. Notice the hand below. Instead of being defensive its more inviting and soft. The head position is also more gentler and inviting. We noticed the dog also in comparison to the cat above. The dog symbolises more control, the owner being more of a master; cat being more of a free spirit and more wild. You can't really train a cat.
This is an image from an American Apparel advert. All of the AA adverts mimic this style of photography. The women's clothing adverts generally feature relatively naked women. Most of the women are posing in 'seductive' positions. Here we can denote the women blowing a buble with her chewing gum which could be observed as playful.
Linking back to the gaze we said that most of the paintings of women which were produced in Alexandre Cabanel's era tried to represent the females faces as looking child like; children playing the subservient role with an adult having authority over them. Again this is to do with power, dominance and general control over the women.
The women's position is quite submissive too, by lying down she is almost offering herself in an ideal fantasy. Also the fact that she is lying on a bed carries connotations of sex. The stocking/socks are also associated with seduction.
The title 'bubblelicious' also carries connotations of being quite a fun word, again playful.
Coward, R., 'The Look', in Thomas, J. (ed.) (2000), Reading Images, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pahes 33-39
5 Quotes explained:
"The saturation of society with images of women has nothing to do with men's natural appreciation of objective beauty, their aesthetic appreciation, and everything to do with an obsessive recording and use of women's images in ways which make men feel comfortable. And women are bound to this power precisely because visual impressions have been elevated to the position of holding the key to our psychic well-being, our social success, and indeed to whether or not we will be loved."
The first sentence is basically saying that the reasons men find women aesthetically attractive is not natural but a manipulation of artificial feelings created by men for other men to feel powerful and dominant. The next sentence is saying that because of the trained appreciation of these fake feelings is becomes the normal for men to automatically think in this way and it turn women are trained to respond to these demands to conform and find love or a relationship because the vast majority of men have these preconceived ideas of aesthetic beauty.
"Advertising is this society builds precisely on the creation of an anxiety to the effect that, unless we measure up, we will not be loved. We are set to work on an ever-increasing number of areas of the body, laboring to perfect and eroticise an ever-increasing number of erotogenic zones. Every minute region of the body is now exposed to this scrutiny by the ideal. Mouth, hair, eyes, eyelashes, nails, fingers, hands, skin, teeth, lips, cheeks, shoulders, arms, legs, feet - all these and many more have become areas requiring work. Each area requires potions, moisterisers, conditioners, night creams, creams to cover up blemishes. Moisterise, display, clean off, rejuvenate - we could well be at it all day, preparing the face to meet the faces we meet. "
I sum this up as advertisers are purposely creating areas of the body we can 'improve' in order for their to be a product for it. Basically a jobsworth of the human body which needs maintenance and needs money spending on it to be acceptable in current society.
"Where women's behavior was previously controlled directly by state, family and church, control of women is now also affected through the scrutiny of women by visual ideas. Photography, film and television offer themselves as transparent recordings of reality."
I think this is an easier quite to understand if not obvious but what its basically saying is that
times have changed and from the more predominate form of control being the church and state there is a more passive form of control which is the media. Controlling people through visual language which is current.
"True though it is that women, especially young women, are deeply concerned with their own images, it is radically incorrect to liken women's relation with media images to the happy state of Narcissus. Women's relation to their own self-image is much more likely to be dominated by discontent."
This can be summarised that women are interested in their own appearance but not in a vain manor but more in a forced annoyance of having to conform. Worrying that they are not socially aesthetically pleasing to men and that they will not be loved for being anything different from the cultural idea of beauty.
"Because women are compelled to make themselves attractive in certain ways, and those ways involve submitting to the cultures beliefs about appropriate sexual behavior, women's appearances are laden down with cultural values, or, with difficulty against them."
Because women are pressured to dress and make themselves attractive to a typical mans idea of beauty, they are submitting to the cultural beliefs about how women should behave both sexually and morally. The appearances of a women has lots of different connotations for example red lipstick might be seen as seductive.
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