[copied from my Fashion class blog I wrote for assignment]

The reading discussion I lead last class about the article “Express Yourself” got me thinking about my guy friends who have style and the way they are portrayed by some people. Being that I work in the nightlife scene, I have seen my fair share of metrosexual men and barbie doll looking women. Nightclubs downtown are filled with people dressing like that. But here I want to focus on metrosexual men.

One of the definitions on Urban Dictionary about the term:

metrosexual - 

A normally straight male who possesses qualities of a gay male without being attracted to men. A metro often appreciates the finer things in life and enjoys making himself look good; be it through styling his hair or wearing fashionable clothes. Person 1: “Is he gay” Person 2: “No, he does dress well, but he has a wife” Person 1: “Oh, he must be metro then”

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Psychology of Women is hands down my favorite class of college. I can’t say enough good things about this class and if you go to Roosevelt University in Chicago, you should seriously consider taking this class with Jill Coleman. She makes it really interesting. But that’s beside the point. What I wanted to talk about is something I touched on in my final paper for the class. I wrote about an organization, About-Face, which teaches young girls and women the dangers of media’s sexualization of women on young women’s mental and physical health. Media is one of the sources of stereotypes as it exaggerates the differences between genders. Women are portrayed much differently in media, there is no doubt about that, although there has been a slight movement toward creating more nonsexist and nonracist ads – still, the movement is still rather slight.

During my research for the paper I came across a very interesting blog post written by a creative director about the use of sex in advertising. It’s needless to say that as an advertising major, I absolutely love looking at ad executions – learning from each one; trying to understand the creative’s thinking process and how each ad has different things incorporated in it- stopping power, simplification, shock factor, incongruity of words and images, etc. The ads featured in the blog post were both amazing and shocking; however, many could also be seen as very sexist. What else is new though, right? Sexism has been used as a way to confirm stereotypes, and it is still often used today in form of sexualizing and objectifying women. I’m not going to lie and say these ads aren’t clever – a lot of them are! They are great ads; they make me stop and think, stop and stare. But once I stop and think some more, as a woman (and a student in a class focused on sexism) it really makes me wonder whether we will ever be able to create advertisements that are sexy, but not sexist? Continue Reading