In the chapter 2 'Fixing into images' (pages 38-47), section 'Image as commodity: advertising and women's magazines' Thornham explains how Walter Benjamin explains how the masses have the desire of bringing things 'closer' spatially and humanly with the illusion of the representation of women, but Rachel Bowlby argues that the 'new commerce' appeals mostly to women. Between the shop window and the fashion pages of a magazine there is a continuity and they both are forms of advertising. The link between them all is the triangular positioning of the woman: as seducer/saleswoman, as commodity and as consumer. In contemporary advertisement images are not portraits or real women, but a made up fantasy. The real features are being erased so the woman is objectified to enhance masculine fantasies of knowledge, power and possession behind a mask of beauty.
Thornman also mentions John Berger's documentary regarding the poses of the models in contemporary advertisement, very similar to the old pictures Berger analysis in his film. It is very common to find an image of a woman looking at the audience like she was self-absorbed looking to a mirror, but available for our gaze. It is obvious that women also have been spectators of this kind of images, but their gaze has been marginalised. Only when they became recognised consumers their gaze was actively solicited through the display of commodities for their consumption. As Bowlby points out, the domestic setting was replaced by the shop window, which acted as a mirror of the modern woman. As Berger says in his documentary:
"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight".
Judith Williamson in Decoding Advertisements analyses how advertisements act as semiotic and ideological structures. Subjects are created from ideologies and advertisement has a very important role in molding subjects. Audience take for granted the fact that they are consumers and they freely buy things. Therefore, audience becomes the canvas where the meaning is drawn and the active makers of that meaning.
Jackie Stacey has a similar argument in her 'Study of female fans', where she claims that working on femininity requires consumption - of commodities and images - turning women in subjects and objects of exchange. To be a woman has become a synonym of being an image. Although, Stacey claims that this process also involves 'active negotiation and transformation of identities', so it would be unfair to merely call it a simple objectification.
Hilary Radner in 'The woman as subject' highlights that woman 'is invited to take control of the process whereby she represents herself'. But also women are constantly reminded to use products in order to externalise their identities. In this way, women are 'actively engaged in the processes of construction and complicit in the system of consumerism that constitutes her as a subject'. Women are usually represented as icons, following the same pattern of conventional and socially established images of female beauty and self-management.
After this analysis Thornham concludes that these ways of communication have positioned women as both consumers and images to be consumed. As historical beings women cannot avoid being represented, so they have been so in relation to its images and discourses.
In another section called 'Image as simulation' Thornham points out again that women in contemporary advertisements appear like masks or mannequins, they do not look real. Femininity is a mere simulation. Advertising do not communicates or inform anymore. It is the image what it is being sold, not the products really. Jean Baudrillard claims 'the very distinction between authencity and artifice is without foundation' a proposition, he adds, 'which aligns femininity with simulation'. Baudrillard also speaks about how 'the power of production (masculine)' opposes the 'power of seduction (feminine). What really frustrates men is the women's power of being the 'absolute master of the realm of appearances'. Therefore, seduction is the capacity of lying in a playful way. Appearances are not real.
Pages (38-47)
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