The media allows all the types of gazes to occur by promoting their views as the model. Other types are second best and looked down upon. The gaze is a relationship of looking. It allows the viewer to identify a subject and an object of text. It is easy to depict the subject and object of a text but, evaluating can be a little more difficult.
A gendered gaze creates the image of how gendered bodies should act. Moral gaze determines a body’s worth by appearance alone. Along with moral gaze comes racialized, determining how a body should act based on ethnicity. The socialized gaze governs how the particular body should act socially. Using all of these gazes as a cornerstone is the internalized gaze. The internalized gaze is one we act put upon ourselves to make sure we are acting and looking how the media tells us to.
The way the media structures our minds to view bodies as objects. Most of the text produced by the media has a spin of sexual arousal put with them. In this Marc Jacobs ad we see a woman’s legs sticking out of a large Marc Jacobs bag. Her legs are spread wide apart. This male gendered gaze promotes a promiscuously inviting view as the object looks like she has helplessly been engulfed by the designer shopping bag.
Although attempting to take a stealth approach, the media continuously hammers the ideal body into the audiences head. The media connects a certain body type with a certain lifestyle. This is linked to the social and moral gaze. The thin female actress is a lot of the time cast as a woman who needs a man to hold her up, while a thicker female is the single friend either with low self-esteem or a good sense of humor to get herself through the day because she is alone. The thick friend can also hold the image that she is independent and can take care of herself. The institution supports the body type clichés by the roles they play.
In this image, the woman is clearly thin, toned and tan. Three conceptions set as the perfect body type. Bordo makes the point in her article that it’s ‘never just bodies’. Meaning, the images provide a lesson in what is valued in our culture. Idolizing these types of images is taking a toll on females. Women are obsessing and viewing fat as the devil because the bodies they are exposed to are paper thin unrealistic images. Real and ideal are undoubtedly very different when it comes to body images in our culture.
Consumerism is undeniably explicitly used as a way of means for maintaining hegemonic beauty ideals. In our culture, thin, trimmed and bronzed bodies are something for females to aspire to, while males are geared towards a muscularly fit and tan body. In our society the audience is fed countless products to help achieve the beautiful body. From make-up to diet pills consumers are willing to try anything that guarantees them to look like their idols. It is this order of hegemony that practically keeps retailers in business; someone is always looking to be better than someone else.
The hegemonic dominance gears our internalized gaze. When our minds are loaded with these types of images and there really isn’t much diversity we become almost brainwashed in our ways of thinking. Anorexics, no matter how dangerously skinny they are, see themselves as overweight. It’s a mental disease that controls their thoughts. Bordo goes into anorexia as a possible result of the images showed to us by the industry. Although I disagree as it being the only cause, it can be traced back through our cultural anxiety when related to parental issues that have been passed down.
The Marc Jacobs ad shows how much consumerism is linked to the hegemonic body. In one light it shows the extent of how badly consumerism has taken over because the female is literally taken over by the bag. In another light we can see the underlying message that even with only a pair of heels visible, the idea of wearing this designer is what the beautiful body does and one needs to wear it too to achieve the look.
