noreply@blogger.com (Amna Amir) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:32:00 +0000

Built to Satisfy!

Media and advertisements have always contributed to defining and maintianing gender bias. Women are populary portrayed as domesticated and sexual objects. In this painting I pick up on both these aspecs but instead of a woman I have placed a man as the object of the gaze, doing a domstic chore, looking totally buff with the overhead caption "Built to Satisfy". The pupose is to make the viewer wonder who or what is really being advertised here; the pumped and buffed man or the sewing machine that he's using. I have appropriated the look of an early 1900s advertisement to make my point because adverts used alot of illustration in those days and were not as sensitive towards being politically correct as some advertisements are these days.

The concept is fairly simple and the figure turned out looking rather stereotypically gay in the end and I wonder if its just the fact that he's wearing a sleeveless vest, has a lot of muscles and very little hair that is giving him this appearance or is it because we automatically assume he's gay due to his domesticated and sexualized position in the advertisement. I just wanted this ad to seem as absurd as the ads that present women in sexualized roles trying to sell auto parts or something totally unrelated to sex.

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