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1LECTURE 7
Gill
What is postfeminism? How is it different from feminism?
Some examine contemporary sexualisation as post-feminism linked to discourses
of celebrity, choice and empowerment. Sexual objectification is being
repackaged as empowerment, yet it stays essentially commercial. There are
concerns regarding gender asymmetry of sexualisation: proving that you are hot,
worthy of lust and that you seek to provoke lust since this is still exclusively
women’s work.
What's the midriff stereotype? the six-pack stereotype? Why are the
midriff and six-pack stereotypes celebrated in Western consumer
culture today?
Six-pack stereotype
Men have now takes their place alongside women on billboards, cinema screens
and in magazines. There is a specific way of depicting the male body: idealized
and eroticized aesthetic showing a toned young body. It gives permission for
them to be looked at and desired. This transformation was prompted with the
fact that we are all objectified now. The level of male representations can be
understood as part of the shift away from the male as norm, in which masculinity
lost its unmarked status and became visible as gendered.
Some argue that white masculinity was rendered visible through pressure from
black and women’s liberation movements, which were highly critical of its
hegemony.
The man was being reinvented as more gentle, emotional and communicative.
The growing pink economy helped to produce a greater range of presentations of
men in magazines. These images went mainstream, opening up space for an
active gaze among heterosexual women. The shift had significant economic
determinants: retailers, marketers and magazine publishers were keen to
develop new markets and had affluent men in their sights as the biggest
untapped source of high spending women. The figure of the metrosexual has
come to prominence and symbolizes the extent to which marketing driven
constructions won out over political articulations of new masculinity.
The models are generally white, young, muscular and slim, clean shaven and
they have particular facial features connoting a combination of softness and
strength: strong jaw, large lips and eyes and a soft looking clear skin. The
combination of muscularity and hardness AND softness in the look of the models
is to manage contradictory expectations of men and masculinity as strong and
powerful, but also gentle and tender- they embody a cultural contradiction of
what a man is supposed to be.
1
LECTURE 7
, 2
The men as representation of object to be gazed at, rather than the ones doing
the looking constitutes a major shift: cropping male bodies to focus on the
selected eroticized areas like the upper arms, chest and six-pack represents a
metaphorical fragmenting of male power.
The representation of sexualized male figures was often accompanied by a high-
art presentation to distance the potential threats of sexualizing the body. Giving
the representations an arthouse feel/look offered the safety of distance, as well
as connoting affluence, sophistication and class.
Also, men tend not to smile or pout, nor to deploy any bodily gestures or
postures as indices of ritualised subordination of women in advertising, nor are
they depicted in mirror shots, so long a favoured mode for conveying women’s
narcissism. In six-pack advertisements, men are generally portrayed as standing
or involved in some physical activity and they look back at the viewer in ways
reminiscent of street gazes to assert dominance or look up or off, indicating that
their interest is elsewhere. They are pictures alone in ways that reference the
significance of independence as a value marking hegemonic masculinity. Or they
are pictures alongside beautiful women, to reassure the viewers of the man’s
heterosexuality.
Midriff stereotype
A new figure of women has been constructed to sell them: a young, attractive,
heterosexual woman who knowingly and deliberately plays with her sexual
power and is always up for sex. Once they were represented as mute objects of
assumed male gaze, today women are presented as active, desiring, sexual
subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner
because it suits their liberated interests to do so. The woman is knowingly
playing with her sexual power. The confident assertive feminist tone is employed
by advertising through a discourse of playfulness, freedom and choice. Women
are presented as not seeking men’s approval, but as pleasing themselves and in
doing so, they just happen to win men’s admiration. A discourse of
empowerment is also central: buying the product will empower you. This shift is
due to women’s financial independence meaning that they became targets for
new products, and also forces a reconsideration of earlier modes of
representation. In the 1990’s, advertisers had begun to recognize the
significance of many women’s anger at being objectified and bombarded with
unattainable, idealized images of femininity and also the cultural power and
energy of feminism. The result was commodity feminism- a bid to incorporate
feminist ideas whilst emptying them of their political significance and
domesticating their critique of gender relations.
Feminity is these images is presented as powerful, playful and narcissistic – less
desiring of a sexual partner than empowered by the knowledge of her own
sexual attractiveness.
Why the midriff and six-pack stereotypes are differently yet relationally
constructed in Western popular culture today?
2
LECTURE 7
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