Male gaze

Laura Mulvey 

Mulvey claimed that women have turned in to sex objects, through how they are shot in the media today (cinematogrophy). They do this by showing only body parts and not the whole body (including face) they are turned on to objects for male pleasure. She called this fragmentation that lead to objectification.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIXAT6fGUw4

Recent Representations of Feminity

Recent feminity has been associated with a stronger more independant women and confident women, while still bein stereotypically representated as 'sexy'.
This owes much to the spice girls with their 'Girl Power' and the emergence of succesfull women in buisness, the arts and the media.

Explore the ways in which your chosen texts reinforce or challenge typical representations of gender?

Generally perfume adverts have conventions:

• High key lighting 
• Soft enticing music
• Glamorous models
• Certain genders being sexualised
• Trying to hit their target audience by using them as sex objects
• Always have the brand name
• Famous celebrities to entice the audience
• The narrator always has a soft sexual voice

What the audience expect from the texts/genre?

The audience's expectations from perfume adverts are that they will be very sexualised to try and entice the different genders or very glamorous so that it makes the audience feel that they can be glamorous and the same things can happen to them. They also expect there to be the name of the perfume they are selling and the maker of this perfume as it is an 'advertisement'. The perfume bottle also can be placed in very sexual places such as above as it catches the audiences attention which makes people begin to talk about it.

Sex in advertising

http://sexinadvertising.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/sexy-tom-ford-fragrance-ads.html

Tom Ford

There is a lot of buzz surrounding the sexually provocative ads heralding Tom Ford's fragrance for men. More provocative is the website flash presentation of the fragrance bottle strategically placed around a women's breasts and groin (there's as much buzz about the model's shaved pubic region).

The approach is not surprising given Ford's history with designer brands. He was creative director for Gucci and YSL. During his very successful tenure at both brands, he reinvigorated them with cutting-edge sexually featuring nudity and pornographic themes that include female same-sex images (lesbian chic).

Given the sexually-laden promotions he's chosen to run in the past, Ford's current campaign does accurately represnt the brand's essence: If the fragrance carries his name, it's about sex.

A study several years ago found that about half of all fragrances were positioned with sex. True, fragrance can play a role in the attraction formula, but fragrance is unique in that it really has little meaning aside from the images it is associated with. In this case, Tom Ford is fairly certain that money will be made with his current campaign. He would know.

http://cgspice.com/controversial/729-tom-ford-cologne-campaign.html

Tom Ford’s latest cologne ad might be considered a little crude, but the sexy advertising technique is certainly proving effective. The commercial is getting a lot of attention for the provacative image of a woman grabbing her unnaturally round, full breasts with her manicured hands, pressing them. In Tom Ford’s risque new campaign, just like his last ad, (see below) a very nude woman is featured wearing nothing but the product. This time, instead of being placed between her cleavage, it was placed between her legs.
“The company, reacting to the predominance of erotic products which makes a person more attractive to another, has bottled the smell of sex (in the form of a “beguiling vaginal scent”) and is selling it as a fragrance for men to wear seemingly to bring them pleasure in the absence of the real thing,” AdRants said.

Gucci