Male Gaze / Advertising

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• A Coke commercial featured a trio of guys at a party with a trio of girls. The viewer does not see any of the girls' faces, and the camera focuses solely on their tight clothing.
• The Brazilian Butt Lift Commercials are full of Male Gaze. Admittedly, this is a service that would be difficult to sell without use of Male Gaze.
• Evony's banner ads feature little more than a pair of gigantic boobs accompanied by the words "Play now, my lord!" or "Save your lover the Queen!" or "One click for a Roman Orgy!". Evony is a Civilization-esque strategy game.
• The ad for Rappelz starts with a close up of a female upper chest with the caption 'like what you see?'. Even when it zooms out a little, the focus is still there. The fact that she's wearing a Breast Plate doesn't help its cause.
• The banner ads for Claymore on this very wiki. The vertical one is, well, ok, showing a full body shot of one of the female characters decked out for battle. What does the horizontal view do? It starts out showing only her chest. It then moves further up her body as the ad continues, but the shot of her breasts does its job at catching your eye. Feel free to make the comparison yourself.
• Similarly for the Dragonaut: The Resonance ad. It doesn't seem to focus on anything, but the text makes it clear what you're supposed to be looking at 'Real dragons have curves'. Ironically they chose the least noticeable female dragon to portray.
  • The ads for "Part 2" are similar; the vertical one is okay, but the horizontal one starts out with a shameless buttocks shot. Funi certainly knows how to attract the show's target audience.
• This commercial for Corona light beer.
• This commercial for Reebok EasyTone shoes, designed to "make your legs and butt look good". The ad is a pleasantly-constructed young woman in short shorts expounding on the virtues of the shoes in question, and the cameraman taking notice of the effect the shoes have on her legs and butt. Naturally, her response is an unamused "eyes up here" gesture.
  • Their ads are ostensibly aimed at women. Maybe gay/bi women are a huge target audience for Reebok?
• An advertisement for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia played with this trope, showing the male gaze until the camera pans up revealing the woman in question to be the hideous (under the makeup, the actress is rather attractive) Margaret McPoyle.
• Played with in a Jean-Paul Gautier perfume campaign. The ad for the male perfume is typical male-gaze: a sailor leaves a woman after a night of passion; she's shown half naked, writhing in the sheets. The ad for the female perfume is exactly the same, except it's the woman leaving and the sailor writhing half naked in the sheets.
• In Killing Us Softly: Advertising's View of Women, her major lecture series, Jean Kilbourne argues that the male gaze is so pervasive in modern culture, particularly advertising, that it has changed the way that women look at each other - that even heterosexual women look at other women in the way that a heterosexual man would.
• Done with a surprising amount of subtlety for an Axe hair gel commercial: A walking messy mop of hair is trying to get the attention of a pair of breasts that works with him. It's not until he uses the product in question that both he and woman see each other as complete people. This is followed by the caption: "Hair, it's what women see first" So what does that say about men?
• An advert for a South African fast food chain stated that they could tell where you'd be looking at and prove it by showing a video. Cue the first part of the advert showing a X going onto woman's breasts and the like and the second part showing it going more onto the burger video on the other side than onto the girls (although it tried to cut back to them).
• Averted in one commercial^note Maybe Snickers or Klondike where a guy keeps his eyes focused on the woman before him and doesn't even pass a glance at Ms. Fanservice walking by. Result, he should get what the commercial was advertising.
• The very first shot of the inspirational women's fitness ad "This Girl Can" is of a woman's backside in a two-piece bathing suit as she walks towards a swimming pool, slides her fingers into her bikini bottoms, and snaps them across her behind. In a subversion, the ad is explicitly aimed at women, and opening shot isn't intended as fanservice—it's intended to encourage women to exercise without being ashamed of their bodies.
• Many men (most infamously Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper) fell back on this to complain about Dove's Real Beauty Campaign ads that dared to—gasp!—portray women of various ethnicities and body sizes rather than the typical stick-thin Caucasian blonde model. The idea that the ads were targeted at women rather than at men looking for something to ogle apparently never occurred to them.
• The NSFW Juiced teaser has this as soon as the men decide to test out the extent of their controller's power by drastically shortening the skirt of a nearby woman, exposing most of her legs in the process as she meekly places her hands over her groin and looks around. Once the woman gets a breast expansion the camera lingering on her chest as her breasts bounce around, much to her confusion and the delight of the men. It only escalates from there as the men quickly remove what's left of her skirt, leaving her in just a g-string as the traffic begins to pick up around her. This trope reaches its climax once the men become even more excited and start giggling at the woman's plight. As the commercial gets closer to the end with the woman spinning in place and leaving her entire body exposed for everybody to see before her arms are raised behind her head in order to expose her entire figure. As her spinning starts to end, the camera cuts to showing just the woman's scantly clad pelvis as she's turned around a few more times, making sure that the audience is looking at the exact things that the men are focused on at this point, while the Juiced logo gets branded onto her butt. And then they remotely smack her rear with their controllers. And if what this article has to say on the matter is taken at face value, the men eventually strip the woman of her last article of clothing after the ad ends.

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