I sometimes get Vogue magazines in the mail. I usually don't read
magazines, but I read my Vogue magazine I received in May for this
assignment.
Usually when I go through magazines I don’t pay much attention to the
ads. I usually sniff the perfumes and then turn the page. This time, I paid
closer attention to the ads in the magazine, and I found that the Laura
Mulvey’s Gaze Theory applies to almost all of the ads that I saw.
The Gaze Theory is a theory by Laura Mulvey from 1976 that states women
on screen are subject to male gaze (Gender Media Critiques lecture, 2013). Male
gaze means that women are seen as objects or subordinates (2013). This theory
looks at how men see women, how women see women, and a women sees herself as
well, because it isn’t just men who adopt the male gaze (2013).
While I was looking through the magazine ads almost all of them had a
women in vulnerable body positions or in revealing clothing. Although none of
the ads had saying like the ads we saw in class, a lot of them had one word on
them. Some said “desire” or “Impulsive”.
By seeing ads like this in a women’s magazine made me realize that the
Gaze Theory is correct. Both men and women see women as objects. Although I saw
a lot of ads that backed up the Gaze Theory, I believe that if I looked at a different
magazine like Cosmopolitan, I would have seen even more racy ads that support
the Gaze Theory.
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