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Males in Female Poses

2009 April 1
by SarahLeia

In class today there was some talk about the difference between erotic, or simply attractive, poses for males and females. While doing research for my last paper about the male gaze I came across this very interesting web essay that actually compares images of women and men in typical advertisement poses. The essay itself focuses mostly on the way that females are posed in relation to the viewer of the ad, and what part of the woman the camera may be focusing on or emphasizing. But the essay also makes a point about the difference that exists between the way men and women are portrayed, and the images of men in poses that are typically female, semi-erotic ones were very striking to me.

If the topic of representation in advertising is interesting to you, I would recommend the site Gender Ads. This site has compiled many images from advertising of both males and females, and put them in categories to analyze the portrayal of the genders. It is worth noting that there is a lot more on there about the sexualization of females than the sexualization of males, and this goes back to a question that I think was asked today but never really answered. How are males sexualized by images in the media? What portrayal of men is erotic? Is it the Fabio image that Sugar Spice wrote about a good example of this? (personally, I have always found this Fabio image to be ridiculous and not at all sexy, but that’s just my opinion.) It seems like everyone always talks about representation of females, and while I think this happens because there is just a lot more sexualization of females than males in mainstream images, there is still a lot that could be said about the sexualization of males.

2 Responses
  1. Aline permalink
    April 4, 2009

    This was really interesting. I agree however, everyone seems to talk about the representation of females and the male gaze. What about the female gaze on males? There are plenty of sexy advertisements out there that say men are on display for women. Or perhaps, we are all on display, looking at one another. Could it not be said that someone is always the subject of another person’s gaze, regardless of their sex?

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