Context of Practice 2: Seminar 3

During today's seminar we went over the lecture from 2 weeks ago and then also linked it in with last weeks lecture, which unfortunately I couldn't attend but I got a general idea of what it was about. The seminar today basically went over Identity and The Gaze and the Media, which were two subjects that were very closely linked together and we related this too our own subject of film, games and animation.

Laura Mulvery
We started off by talking about Laura Mulvery, who wrote Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema (1975). She had a number of different theories about the gaze and how the media portrays the figure of a woman:
- Hollywood film is sexist and the gaze represents how men are poweful
- Heroes are typically male and drive the plot
- Women in film exists as 'sexual' objects to be 'looked at'

Fragrance Advertising
Two of the main fragrance houses use this kind of technique, of using sexual looking women, to promote there fragrances and in particular Opium for Yves Saint Laurent and any Dolce and Gabbana promotional advert.These two advert really sexualise women and portray them in such a negative way by saying this is how women should look and anything else other than this is wrong.

Game Industry
We can then relate The Gaze and the Media to the games industry as well especially if they are from the East, mainly in Japan or China, in terms of Manga and Anime. In these animations and games women are portray in a very sexist way as they will try and put women in the least amount of clothes possible and make them look as young as they can get away with, in which most of them look about 16.

Another example is the Grand Theft Auto series, which as I have previously stated does degrade women in the fact that you can go to strip clubs and use the money you have earned through completing mission to pay for lap dances and other things of this fashion. Again another example is the Tomb Raider series in which Lara is portrayed as being this well brought up British millionaire yet she goes into jungles wearing basically nothing. Also in the older games when Lara died she did make an orgasmic noise, which was changed in the newest game to be more gruesome so that you didn't want to die over and over.

The Age of Virtual Beauty
Another aspect of the gaming industry is the way females are digitally created to look there most attractive and desirable. Typically people would say and think that men would design what the female figure should look like in the industry of gaming but the concept artists don't design the figure they just look at the hair and clothes. This can be a common misconception as it is not the concept artist that designs the figure but the generalisation of what women should look like and if the artist didn't make the women look like this then they would probably get fired.

An interesting topic that is also related to this subject is the age of virtual beauty in which more and more people are creating virtual women to compete in virtual beauty contests in which, mainly men, are designing their dream women to try and create the best looking virtual woman every year.