Examples of sexual objectification in movies

[Me Myself]

As the title says.

I want to understand this subject better, so I think if we get more specific, maybe I´ll see something I´ve been missing.

I would like it if someones can help me see which movies are examples of "objectification", the specific reasons why they are objectification too.

Also I would want you to present movies to me that in your opinion doesn´t have this objectifications.

So in this way I expect to see the differences.

Please Stick to examples. Any elaboration of what you think is objectification MUST come with an example linked to the specific movie you mention for it to be relevant to this thread.

I would like to understand it as clearly as it can be put.

So, hopefully, I´ll learn something from this

edit:

PLEASE, EVERY post make it have an example of a movie with and amovie WITHOUT objectification. BOTH carefully explained what makes it objectifying to women and what makes it not.

Thanks

 

[waitasec]

any james bond flick
american pie
objectifies women imo

silence of the lambs
v for vendetta
do not

haven't seen any current adult movies...i have a young son

 

[Me Myself]

You said nothing

:sad4:

 

[waitasec]

You said nothing

:sad4:

you haven't seen those movies?

 

[MysticSang'ha]

Are women props for a male protagonist hero, or that the hero must "win"? These are films that objectify women.

Also, think any film that displays the theory of the Male Gaze.

When it comes to films that do not objectify women.....think any plot where the women are actively involved in the continuity, integral to the story, and are not any prize that is won for a male hero, but independent in her own right.

For example, compare any Transformers movie to Kill Bill vol 1 and 2.

The differences between how women are portrayed and utlized are remarkable.

 

[Me Myself]

you haven't seen those movies?

I want you to say specific things you saw in those movies that in your opinion objectify women.

In the other hand, how the movies that don´t doesn´t do that (I know this one is kind of weird, if anything, tell me what things it could have done it didn´t but if you cannot explain that one, I do understand)

 

[Me Myself]

Are women props for a male protagonist hero, or that the hero must "win"? These are films that objectify women.

Also, think any film that displays the theory of the Male Gaze.

When it comes to films that do not objectify women.....think any plot where the women are actively involved in the continuity, integral to the story, and are not any prize that is won for a male hero, but independent in her own right.

For example, compare any Transformers movie to Kill Bill vol 1 and 2.

The differences between how women are portrayed and utlized are remarkable.

Specifics please

You think a suitable romantic partner is a bad "prize " for the end of the movie? You don´t like romantic comedies?

When I asked examples, I meant that everything most come with examples.

I am surprised, given at the amoount of weight the idea of "objectification" in movie porttrayal has been put every other thread I see, I´d thought you´d have like dozens of movies on this thread.

So far I get from you one example of each (which was the minimum requirement, so I guess it´s not bad as long as more people answer)

 

[Me Myself]

I just figured that for it to be clear if there is a lot of "objectification" in movies in general, it would be better to have a reduced but neutral sample.

So I will post a list of movies released recently and you may tell me how much of them "objectify" women and WHY . (please be specific)

Movies:

Spoiler: Objectifying or not?

The five year engagement

Snow White and the huntsman

Friends with Kids

Men in Black 3

Jat and Juliet

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire hunter

Chernobyl diaries.

The Pact

Red Lights

Rock of ages.

Lay the favorites

Prometheous 3D

Storage

Fast girls.

This was my source:

http://www.myvue.com/latest-movies/ ( I just googled "latest movies" )

So, to really get this and to realize if there truly is a major trend of "objectification", better tell me from this movies, how many "objectify" women in here? and WHY? (which parts or forms of the movie objectify women?)

You may also provide a random source of movies to give a sample of movies and pick Womanizing movies from there. I just want to really see if there is a culture that is promoting th "objectification" of women in the movies.

 

[Kerr]

At the moment I can think of "Van the man" as a movie that does objectify women and Star Wars and Star Trek movies as examples of movies that doesnt.

 

[Me Myself]

At the moment I can think of "Van the man" as a movie that does objectify women and Star Wars and Star Trek movies as examples of movies that doesnt.

Thanks for contributing, but please do com back when you can give it a better thought if you will

Actually, it´d be awesome if you could look at the list I put above this post of yours I am quoting.

I am trying to find out if it is really truth that most movie "objectify" women, so the post above makes an exercise I think should be better to determine this.

I truly want to get to the bottom of it. So if you wish to find out with me, by all means.

I won´t lie, I am somewhat suspicious of the statement, but I figure that better than just saying "you are exagerating" or "that´s not even different or bad because x" I would need to see how widespread it is this conduct and which specific conducts ar eyou refering to when you call on this phenomena.

 

[Kerr]

Thanks for contributing, but please do com back when you can give it a better thought if you will

Actually, it´d be awesome if you could look at the list I put above this post of yours I am quoting.

I am trying to find out if it is really truth that most movie "objectify" women, so the post above makes an exercise I think should be better to determine this.

I truly want to get to the bottom of it. So if you wish to find out with me, by all means.

I won´t lie, I am somewhat suspicious of the statement, but I figure that better than just saying "you are exagerating" or "that´s not even different or bad because x" I would need to see how widespread it is this conduct and which specific conducts ar eyou refering to when you call on this phenomena.

I dont know if most do, but a lot do. As have already been mentioned, American Pie movies does it. Think xXx did it but it was a while ago I watched it (no, its not a porno, its an action movie they gave an odd name). Think the TV series Burn Notice did it (it did like to focus on female body parts and the main female character was so skinny it was scary). Tomcats did it if I remember correctly.

 

[Me Myself]

I dont know if most do, but a lot do.

"A lot" has little relebance. People wont be brain washed by "A lot" of movies about how they view women if "A lot" is the 1% - 5%

What specifically about American Pie?

 

[MysticSang'ha]

Specifics please

You think a suitable romantic partner is a bad "prize " for the end of the movie? You don´t like romantic comedies?

I mean, what is the role of the female in the typical shoot-em-up testosterone movies? In the example of Transformers and Megan Fox, the only reason she is there is to be a prop for the audience to look at and for the male protagonist to "win" as a prize at the end. She does little to nothing to move the story along.

I am surprised, given at the amoount of weight the idea of "objectification" in movie porttrayal has been put every other thread I see, I´d thought you´d have like dozens of movies on this thread.

So far I get from you one example of each (which was the minimum requirement, so I guess it´s not bad as long as more people answer)

You know, MM, you provided plenty of examples where objectification occurs, and yet you justify the reason behind it that "sex sells" and that this is apparently, in your opinion, what "the vast majority of men" think and want. My husband looked at your arguments in the other thread, laughed, and told me I'm wasting my time arguing with you since you're taking visual stimulus too far (his words).

I'm arguing in the hopes that you don't screw up your romantic life in the future by giving you valuable information about women and what we like and don't like. And I'm telling you, women are turned off by everything you have been saying and will run in the opposite direction.

But, just to humor you, I'll give you a source of feminist film theory that describes the overwhelming amount of sexual objectification in film and ads.

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument. From an explicitly psychoanalytic viewpoint, Mulvey argues that that cinema provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor. Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding why film creates a space where women are viewed as sexual objects by men. She says that it is the combination of the patriarchal order of society and looking as a pleasurable act (voyeurism) that create film as an outlet for female sexual exploitation. An important observation that she makes is that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist. According to her, without a woman to compare to, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. She argues that it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.

Source

 

[MysticSang'ha]

From the same source as my previous post:

Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film to sexually objectify women. The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the audience as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film. This argument, of course, conveniently ignores the presence of Gay males in any given movie audience.

Sexual objectification of women in movies as a standard model ignores variances in sexual orientation and assumes the audience member to be the heterosexual male who only wants to ogle at the hot chick and to live vicariously through the lens of the male protagonist. And that the hot chick typically is the damsel in distress, and she must be saved by the hero.

But let's go back to sexual orientation and it's portrayals in film and in the assumption of the audience viewer. Most hollywood movies assume that women like me don't exist, that we like women but don't care for brainless helpless women. Or that gay men don't exist, who don't care for brainless helpless women with hips like a 10 year old boy but with large breasts.

Now I turn the attention to Kill Bill vol 1 and 2. The protagonist in the story is The Bride, an assassin who we see is shot in the head at the very beginning while pregnant with her would-be-killer's child, survives after 4 years in a coma, and then wakes up to see all that she cares for is gone and she vows revenge. The entire plot is her killing everyone who was involved in her demise, and the majority of the people she vows to kill are women who plotted with Bill earlier.

She is a woman, who is a mother, who believes her child was dead, who lost her fiance in the shooting, and who makes a decision that is the entire plotline of the movie franchise....to kill Bill. Her quest takes her from killing an entire army, to forgiveness of one of her attackers, to killing a woman who is also a mother (and compassionately tells the daughter who witness her mother's murder that she'll "be waiting" for her when she grows up), to facing her fears and her past with Pai Mei after being buried alive by Budd, to eventually facing Bill and telling her story of leaving her job as an assassin when she discovered she was pregnant with his child. That she wanted a better life for this human being, and that she was doing all that she could to create a life for her daughter.

There are no female props in Kill Bill. No gratuitous scenes of ogling at breasts or legs or behinds. No helpless women who get themselves in trouble and must be saved by men. These are all deadly women who are skilled in their craft, who are powerful, intelligent, and complex characters. (Indeed, the story of Oren-Ishii is critical to understanding the final duel at the end of Part 1 as much more than two women clashing katanas, and it's my favorite fight scene ever produced for the big screen)

Kill Bill is also wildly popular with the typical 18-25 year old male demographic, fyi.

It's because of films like the Kill Bill franchise and like Deathproof (which is actually one of my husband's favorite movies) that has Tarantino as one of my favorite directors, even though I could have done without "4 Rooms". ....Deathproof shows strong women who turn the typical horror genre plotline on it's head, and never gratuitously show skin, who turn the game around on a man who is hunting them down to kill them, and wind up killing the killer in the end.

There you go. Specifics.

 

[Kerr]

"A lot" has little relebance. People wont be brain washed by "A lot" of movies about how they view women if "A lot" is the 1% - 5%

I meant proportionally "a lot" . So I think its a lot more the 1-5%. But which "side" actually has more then 50% I dont know.

What specifically about American Pie?

Ok, I have to ask something first. Have you seen the American Pie movies? Any of them?

 

[Kerr]

I mean, what is the role of the female in the typical shoot-em-up testosterone movies? In the example of Transformers and Megan Fox, the only reason she is there is to be a prop for the audience to look at and for the male protagonist to "win" as a prize at the end. She does little to nothing to move the story along.



You know, MM, you provided plenty of examples where objectification occurs, and yet you justify the reason behind it that "sex sells" and that this is apparently, in your opinion, what "the vast majority of men" think and want. My husband looked at your arguments in the other thread, laughed, and told me I'm wasting my time arguing with you since you're taking visual stimulus too far (his words).

I'm arguing in the hopes that you don't screw up your romantic life in the future by giving you valuable information about women and what we like and don't like. And I'm telling you, women are turned off by everything you have been saying and will run in the opposite direction.

But, just to humor you, I'll give you a source of feminist film theory that describes the overwhelming amount of sexual objectification in film and ads.



Source

I dont remember exactly what its called but I remember this movie that made a twist on this. It was a romantic comedy about a sexist jerk who was hypnotized so he could only see inner beauty. The movie was silly but in the end, when he got rid of that thing, his "prize" was a really, really fat woman.

 

[Kerr]

Thinking about it I think the Millenium trilogy is an example of books and movies that manages to contain tons of sex (including a rather revealing lesbian sex scene) without objectifying women and without actually becoming sexist.

 

[Kathryn]

It seems we need some help with defining and verbalizing "objectification." Here's a good article on some 2011 films. This should help:

Normalizing Sexual Objectification: 2011 Hollywood Films
DECEMBER 19, 2011
tags: 2011 Hollywood films and sexual objectification, objectification of women in media
by Jeff Smith (GRIID)
The other day we posted an analysis article looking at product placement/branding in Hollywood films. This article will take a look at examples of hyper-sexualization in 2011 Hollywood films and messages about sexual assault.

Like previous years, 2011 was not much different for Hollywood in terms of how women were represented as sexual objects for male pleasure. In the film Just Go With It, Adam Sandler continues to play a character that gets to act out his male fantasies. Sandler plays a plastic surgeon who gets his female assistant to play his ex-wife as a means to get a young woman to like him even more. Both the young woman and his assistant (played by Jennifer Aniston) are presented as being hyper-sexual objects for the camera, with the slow motion and accompanying music, which has become the standard when women’s bodies are shown on the big screen.



Other films that objectify women and presents them as being available for men are films like 30 Minutes or Less and 50/50. In 30 Minutes or Less (filmed in Grand Rapids), both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” in this comedy use women for nothing more than sexual pleasure. One of the good guys gets a blowjob early on in the film while his friend watches from the porch steps. After the woman performs oral sex on this character says thanks just seconds after he has an orgasm and gets out of the car. One of the “bad guys” in the film goes to a bar, where a woman takes her top off and tells him sexual fantasies based on his claim to have access to a million dollars.

In 50/50, the main character is diagnosed with cancer and struggles to come to terms with his disease. His best friend, played by Seth Rogan, convinces him to use his cancer as a means to “get *****.” While at a bar the guys pick up two women and play up the cancer angle. After having drinks and spending time on the boardwalk, the guys end up taking the women home with them. Before they take the women home the character with the cancer tells his friend he is tired and wants to go home. His friend says, “Don’t throw this all away. Don’t waste my time, man.” While the film does a good job of personalizing the struggle people can have with cancer, the sexual use of women by men adds nothing substantive to the plot and just adds to Seth Rogan’s resume of play characters which treat women as nothing more than objects.



Another film that presents women in a hyper-sexualized way is the Bad Teacher. The main character is played by Cameron Diaz, a teacher at a middle school with no real teaching skills. She decides she needs breast implants in order to win the affection of a fellow teacher. While at the plastic surgeon’s office she is shown felling and talking about another woman’s breasts. Not only does this scene fulfill male fantasy it presents women as willing to go to any length to get a man.

However, the breasts implants are too expensive, so Cameron Diaz’ character tries numerous ways to get the funds she needs. In one scene she shows up to at a school car wash dressed in short shorts and revealing top. As she washes the cars she acts in very sexualized ways, again accompanied by slow motion and a hard rock song, Sweet Cherry Pie.

Other films that objectify women are Conan the Barbarian and The Change Up. In Conan, the female objectification takes place when Conan liberates slaves. Ironically, the male slaves look dirty and undernourished, but the women just happen to be clean, healthy looking and topless. Of course, their “freedom” also means they now become “available” for Conan and his other barbarian friends.

In The Change Up, the two main characters are men, who because they ****** in a public fountain together end up switching bodies. In this comedy, Jason Bateman’s character is now inside Ryan Reynolds’ body. Reynolds’ character is a bit of a slacker but does have an upcoming acting gig, which Jason Bateman’s character must now fulfill. The surprise is that the acting job in a role in a pornographic film, which is also presented in a humorous way.

Another scene in The Change Up has Ryan Reynolds in Jason Bateman’s body. Bateman’s character is married and now Ryan Reynolds thinks he has the opportunity to sleep with Bateman’s wife. He is waiting in the bed as she comes in the room with nothing on and walks towards the bathroom in, you guessed it, slow motion. Viewers see the woman’s breasts close up and then as she moves past the camera here is a tight shot of her butt.

Male attitudes about sexual harassment

The last example we want to take a look at is the film Horrible Bosses. In this film the three main characters are men, all of which have bosses they hate. The plot in this comedy centers around these three guys trying to figure a way to get their bosses killed.

One of the characters has a female boss who is sexually harassing him on the job, coming on to him and doing things that would certainly be considered sexual harassment as it is legally defined. Early on in the film the three guys are at the bar talking about how much they hate their bosses. When it gets to the guy who’s boss is a woman, the other two guys don’t show any empathy for his situation. Here is how the dialogue goes at this point:

“At least you’re boss isn’t sexually harassing you.” (guy 1) “Oh my god here we go.” (guy 2) “You are never gonna get any sympathies from us.” (guy 3) “It’s like a totally hostile work environment. It’s not funny. Today my boss started spraying water on my crotch so she could see the outline of my dick.” (guy 1) “That’s great. Why don’t you just **** her.” (guy 2)

The dialogue continues with his friends who don’t consider it sexual harassment what is happening to him and then one of them sees a woman in the bar that he is going to go talk to. This guy says, “I’m going to go talk to that woman about her vagina.” Imagine if a group of female friends were talking in a bar and one of them said she was being sexually harassed by her male boss. Do you think that her friends would tell her that she would get no sympathy from them and that she should just “****” her boss?

Not only does this scene in Horrible Bosses dismiss that men can be sexually harassed at work, it normalizes that men always want to have sex and that to not take advantage of an opportunity to have sex means you are less than a man. Lastly, what we found in the 2011 Hollywood films we looked at was that sex was almost exclusively presented through the eyes of men, where women were simply made to be available for male pleasure, often in demeaning ways.
Normalizing Sexual Objectification: 2011 Hollywood Films « Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy

 

[Alceste]

There are two basic archetypes of female characters in most movies. The girlfriend and the ****. The girlfriend includes all female characters whose only purpose is to demonstrate that the hero is capable of feeling love and tenderness (Brad Pitt's wife in Seven). The **** includes all immoral villains whose primary purpose is to demonstrate that the hero is capable of either resisting the temptation to get with a sexy person who isn't very nice, or getting with her and then killing or discarding her (James Bond girls).

The best example of a movie I can think of that doesn't fall back on these extremely boring and cliche archetypes is Fargo. The heroine is a pregnant wife, but she doesn't get killed or abducted in the first five minutes to give the hero a reason for a vendetta or rescue mission

 

[Kathryn]

Now, with that clarification, it's somewhat difficult for me to come up with movies that objectify women, because I am very picky about the movies I watch and I purposely avoid most widely released, brain dead action movies - and certainly avoid porn.

I can tell you some movies that do NOT objectify women:

In the Bedroom - Marisa Tomei and Sissy Spacek are both excellent in this movie that specifically addresses how looks, sexuality, and longing based on those rather than on objective reasoning can have traumatic effects

The Color Purple - Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg are basically the OPPOSITE of sexual objectification in this fabulous film that also showcases the pitfalls of objectifying women - and anyone else for that matter.

Juno - Love this little sister and her portrayal of the beauty of a sharp and perceptive mind.

Bridget Jones Diary - the reason why so many women love this movie is because it portrays our struggle against unrealistic expectations. However, I have a problem with it in that even when she's "fat," Bridget isn't...well, she isn't fat. She's not even overweight -she's just not stick thin. Overall, though, I give it a B for effort.