Ideology Of Femininity

Introduction
The media’s role in ‘selling’ femininity and what it takes to be a woman varies across mediums. Femininity within a patriarchal society tends to be looked down upon and regarded as weak and situated on the opposite end on the scale when looking at power and gender empowerment. Femininity can be understood in various ways, subject to the source’s cultural understanding, through a particular medium. Advertisements in particular, define femininity according to the target market of that commodity such as women’s perfume (text 1) and woman’s face cream (text 2) in relation to what is being signified and through which means the signifying is performed. With the help of tools such as denotation, connotation, identifying the signified

78). To be feminine, according to the oxford dictionary, is to have, “qualities associated with woman, especially delicacy and prettiness”. Due to the varying ideologies over time compared to the ideologies today. Gwyneth Panure discussed in, ‘Femininity vs. Social Ideology of Femininity’, that femininity based on social ideologies differs to the femininity portrayed within the media (Panture, 2011). Regarding mediums such as television shows where woman are portrayed as timid and subordinate to others as well as, “dreamily distracted” whereas with mediums such as advertisements, where, “the purpose of the product is to get the

With the woman’s face positioned downwards yet her eyes are looking up interprets her as powerful maintaining a certain amount of control over the interpreter as well as seductive. According to the ‘codes of content’ (Irvine, 2004-2005), within the study of semiology, photographs within advertisements are meant to have a connection to ‘soft porn’, in order to draw the consumer’s attention to what commodity is being advertised . An advertisement of woman fragrance is sexualised for the purpose of buying a product which can make a woman ‘feel’ sexy, this being what is signified (the idea that is communicated) through the advertisement, whereas the signifier (object used to ‘convey meaning’) is the actual bottle of perfume (mediatexthack,