Crouching lady hidden chauvinism

After reading what I had to do, it was beyond easy to find a plethora of ads that pertained to this topic. However, ignoring my usual tendency to just continue looking at something else, I stopped and looked at it. At first glance there is nothing really abnormal about it; it’s the exact thing that you see in every month of Cosmo, or any other magazine out there. Without taking it like any other ad, I looked at it from a completely different point of view. This ad was a perfect of example of John Berger’s look on art that has been repeated continuously for hundreds of years.

This ad is for “Escape for men”, by Calvin Klein, with a simple black and white close up photo of presumably a topless woman and man. If I would have been just looking at this photo under any other circumstances, I would not have picked up anything different about it. However, stopping to analyze this photo allowed me to pick out the following things that Berger described to a tee.

If you just look at the position of the man compared to the woman you can start to see the things wrong with this ad. The man is standing above the woman in a dominating position that clearly exemplifies that the woman is inferior to the man. When you look at the ad, your eye immediately goes to the man’s face, and the woman is lost in the picture; her status as a human is lost and she becomes an object for the man within the ad. "A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you." (Berger, 45) It is easy to see what the man in this picture can “do” to and for you, which is why it makes it so appealing to men and women. Men who see this ad think that if they wear this they will be that powerful and appealing and women will just bend to their will, and women who see this ad are attracted to the men in it, because it shows how powerful and dominating they are. "[A] woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her." (Berger, 46) It’s simple to see in this ad that a woman in her position would bend to the every will of a man in that dominant position, because he is a “real man”.

Those two descriptions seem to fit this ad exactly, and of course many other ads that are out there today, but in fact that was Berger’s description of art in 1972, and how it has been for hundreds of years. Then, whereas the art may not be the same, the roles of men and women within it are.

Reading this, and many of the other blogs might cause a lot more feminist propaganda, but it really has merit. Look at some of the ads that are out there that you would normally glance through. Instead of thumbing past them actually break it down, you will find that what you “see” and what is actually being conveyed are morally quite different.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1990. Print.

Richardson, Tim. “Kewl Commercials/ Weird Ads.” Witiger. 27 March 2009. Web. 9 Oct. 2009. .