Sexism in advertisements is a form of discrimination. The Male Gaze objectifies women to make them just ‘set pieces to sell products’ instead of the actual people they are and it has to be stopped.
What is the male gaze?
The male gaze is a concept that is a disgusting product of the past and needs to be eliminated in today’s society for a better future. The male gaze is a product that tries to sell itself by appealing to heterosexual cis men by objectifying women to be nothing but objects to sexualise themselves for money, profit and sales. This practice was observed by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and thanks to her wonderful and brave research we now know how it works and what we can do to stop the abuse of women in this system of advertisement oppression.
How does it work?
As she goes on, it sexualises women in a way that only means they are objects, in this revolting broken view of women in this lens is that they are nothing more than hot ‘things’ to be looked at and be attracted to and so they will be fooled by their senses and more willing to buy the product, instead of trying to make the product actually good? or making their advertising look appealing. They instead strip apart women of their humanity, personality and everything that makes them a person but instead an object.
Now I do want to say that this is of no fault for the woman in the advertisements this is the cause of capitalism because it’s harder for women to get a job especially back in the 1940s-’90s when discrimination and sexism against women were higher, these were only jobs or good paying jobs.
Examples in Advertisements.
(TW/CW: 18+ content, woman objectified, sexism)
This is quite gross for several reasons, they are not using her in a respectful or in a way that actually shows her worth, she is just being portrayed as a ‘smokin’ hot Texan’ and this is really displayed when they say “it’s the buns” and cut to an image of her butt and then to the product itself and then the ad just shows her eating the burger. Her outfit the managers put her in is very much intentional, tight jeans, a vest and a cowboy hat, all of this is just sexualising and using her to sell some food.
Megan Fox’s character, Mikaela Banes 
Soju Advertisements in korea 
dolce & gabbana ad 
This is actually a Banned Lynx Adverts (sorry for low quality)
All of these ads treat women with such utter disrespect that it’s horrifying to know that this is still being done today in some ways and forms, especially with the alt-right online defending this type of advertising. This can stop, we can treat women with respect, billions of people treat women like people every day, so why do so many adverts keep doing it?
The conclusion is that this won’t stop until we stop paying for these products that still do this so please if any company makes a male gazy ad, complain & boycott.
References:
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
https://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/visual_pleasure_and_narrative_cinema%28printversion%29.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3BA5qCOnkc&ab_channel=cdfries
https://keca2media.blogspot.com/2012/06/ms3ms4-male-gaze-useful-notessite.html
