Who Is Gazing At Whom? A Look At How Sex Is Used In Magazine Advertisements

The article written by scholars at the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, examines the portrayal of males and females in advertising to determine if sex is used to sell products to consumers. For the purpose of this article, sex is defined as one of three things, being the object of self or another's gaze, wearing provocative clothing, or alluring behavior. The article focuses on the objectification of women and how it differs among female or male target audiences. The scholars have found in previous research that advertising which emphasizes appearance, conveys the message that it is acceptable for women to be admired and manipulated by men. For example in advertisements which target males, women are more often portrayed as sex objects rather than in female targeted advertisements. However advertisers argue that advertising simply mirrors gender stereotypes and mainly uses social constructs to sell products. In the advertisements that used sex to sell a product, women actors were far more likely to be used over men, 51% of the characters were women while only 13% were men. The article also discusses how men are more likely to be gazing at objectified characters (60%) than gender neutral (24%) and female audiences (16%). In both male and female targeted advertisements characters wearing provocative clothing posed in an alluring manner are used far more often than in gender neutral advertisements where using sex to sell products is very rare.


Reference: Brown, Stephan. Brooks, Derrick. Matthiae, Chris. McGrill, Leanne. Monk-Turner, Elizabeth. Wren, Kristy. “Who Is Gazing At Whom? A Look At How Sex Is Used In Magazine Advertisements.” in Journal of Gendered Studies. (Eds) Routledge, 2008.