Gaze Construction

MacRury concludes that ‘advertising, it has been assumed, manipulates audiences in general, but women in particular. […] “The consumer”, coded as feminine, is regarded as less capable of judgment and more prone to the irrational impulse’ (2009: 246). This indicates that advertising is more influential on women than men and it uses the weaknesses of consumers, such as emotionality, to use them as its strengths. For example, in the Jean Paul GAULTIER fragrance advertisement (see appendix 1.5) there is portrayed a woman and the gaze is constructed in the way that the eye first focuses on the middle part of the woman’s body and then moves around the image, but there is actually no choice for the eye to start to gaze at the image from the upper part to bottom or vice versa as the eye itself is constructed in the way that it primarily focuses around the centre of a particular object and only then moves around. The advertisement emphasizes the femininity, fragility and in a way also dominance – the qualities women themselves today tend to long for. In this way the creator manipulates with the women (target audience) – at the end there is a question, what connection does these qualities have with the fragrance itself, does the authors of the advertisement actually think that women expect that by buying the fragrance the qualities of the image will automatically come along as the bonus? In a way very much naïve for the creator to expect that, however, the actual sales in the field show differently. Therefore, it can be concluded that the society itself allows to be manipulated with. …