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foliumnondefluet"the male gaze" and how media conditions women to compete for it:
http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/powerpose/index.html
Supposedly ads suggest women use a pretend-submissive pose to gain control over male power by attracting "the gaze".
Personally I think the obvious problem with that is not "omg sex!" but that it conditions girls to think they must sit back and wait for the privilege of being asked out by some violent loser who will beat them up. No wonder then that they get obsessed with their appearance. How about instead teaching young women to be courageous and to stop following the crowd, and to stop thinking "getting a man" is their only means to obtain agency?
These are highly stereotypical, ritualistic poses - and for the record, I'm not in favor of that because the resulting photos are next to useless as artistic pose reference ;) - but that is common in fashion photography, whose primary aim is always (and should be) to show off the clothes to maximum effect. I imagine fashion models get training for that; it's the only explanation for how uninspired and cookie-cutter most fashion photography poses are...
If it's a professional fashion shoot, there's probably a whole team dressing the models and doing their hair and make-up, the photographer and assistants taking care of the lighting and snapping the pictures, and the models -being pros- doing most of the posing by themselves. It's not like the photographer will want to work with models that constantly need to be told what poses to take, I imagine.
The male equivalent of the "submissive pose" might be the "tough guise": http://youtu.be/np2PP76_PxQ
There is also a "female gaze", apparently. It makes men stupid. http://spp.sagepub.com/content/1/1/57.abstract
The authors report a field experiment with skateboarders that demonstrates that physical risk taking by young men increases in the presence of an attractive female. This increased risk taking leads to more successes but also more crash landings in front of a female observer. Mediational analyses suggest that this increase in risk taking is caused in part by elevated testosterone levels of men who performed in front of the attractive female. In addition, skateboarders' risk taking was predicted by their performance on a reversal-learning task, reversal-learning performance was disrupted by the presence of the attractive female, and the female’s presence moderated the observed relationship between risk taking and reversal learning. These results suggest that men use physical risk taking as a sexual display strategy, and they provide suggestive evidence regarding possible hormonal and neural mechanisms.
On second thought, personally I think "male gaze" and "female gaze" are a bit of a misnomer for the problematic aspects of this phenomenon - not only because it's blatantly hetero-normative, but also because I'm convinced that "gender-policing" happens at least as much if not more *within* each gender. Even "attracting a mate" has a significant amount to do with status among gender peers, I think.
Also, Bratz dolls are apparently evil:
http://www.irishhealth.com/index.html?level=4&id=11042
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=437343&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true
http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/powerpose/index.html
Supposedly ads suggest women use a pretend-submissive pose to gain control over male power by attracting "the gaze".
Personally I think the obvious problem with that is not "omg sex!" but that it conditions girls to think they must sit back and wait for the privilege of being asked out by some violent loser who will beat them up. No wonder then that they get obsessed with their appearance. How about instead teaching young women to be courageous and to stop following the crowd, and to stop thinking "getting a man" is their only means to obtain agency?
These are highly stereotypical, ritualistic poses - and for the record, I'm not in favor of that because the resulting photos are next to useless as artistic pose reference ;) - but that is common in fashion photography, whose primary aim is always (and should be) to show off the clothes to maximum effect. I imagine fashion models get training for that; it's the only explanation for how uninspired and cookie-cutter most fashion photography poses are...
If it's a professional fashion shoot, there's probably a whole team dressing the models and doing their hair and make-up, the photographer and assistants taking care of the lighting and snapping the pictures, and the models -being pros- doing most of the posing by themselves. It's not like the photographer will want to work with models that constantly need to be told what poses to take, I imagine.
The male equivalent of the "submissive pose" might be the "tough guise": http://youtu.be/np2PP76_PxQ
There is also a "female gaze", apparently. It makes men stupid. http://spp.sagepub.com/content/1/1/57.abstract
The authors report a field experiment with skateboarders that demonstrates that physical risk taking by young men increases in the presence of an attractive female. This increased risk taking leads to more successes but also more crash landings in front of a female observer. Mediational analyses suggest that this increase in risk taking is caused in part by elevated testosterone levels of men who performed in front of the attractive female. In addition, skateboarders' risk taking was predicted by their performance on a reversal-learning task, reversal-learning performance was disrupted by the presence of the attractive female, and the female’s presence moderated the observed relationship between risk taking and reversal learning. These results suggest that men use physical risk taking as a sexual display strategy, and they provide suggestive evidence regarding possible hormonal and neural mechanisms.
On second thought, personally I think "male gaze" and "female gaze" are a bit of a misnomer for the problematic aspects of this phenomenon - not only because it's blatantly hetero-normative, but also because I'm convinced that "gender-policing" happens at least as much if not more *within* each gender. Even "attracting a mate" has a significant amount to do with status among gender peers, I think.
Also, Bratz dolls are apparently evil:
http://www.irishhealth.com/index.html?level=4&id=11042
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=437343&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true
