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Sunday 23 September 2012

Voyeurism in Music Videos


Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions usually considered to be of a private nature. This concept is explored in music videos to attract the male viewers gaze, to make the main star seem more appealing and to show the star as an object of fantasies.


Voyeurism in music videos is used in different ways, if the main artist is female, for example Rihanna, she will be sexually objectified in the video and shown in a very appealing way to the male viewers, this could be done with the outfits she wears, her dance moves, the camera angles and movements and also framing.
Below are two screen caps from her video 'Only Girl (In The World) that illustrate the use of voyeurism.
From the pictures you can see that her outfit is quite revealing, she is basically wearing just underwear in the second picture, but its not done in a slutty or tasteless way because if it was then the female audience would not want to identify with her and would not like her (and most of her fans are female) so to make Rihanna sexually appealing to the male audiences but also relatable and an icon to her female audience, the director has decided to put her in revealing but also fashionable clothes that could even pass as being cute, in the first picture she is wearing a cute baby blue sweater and knee high socks but her belly and her mid thighs are exposed, so some people might notice her nice clothes and some people might notice the distinct lack of them:



 Rihanna - Only Girl (In The World)




Voyeurism is usually used differently if the music video is for a male artist or a band of some sort. In these kind of videos the artist is not the focus of sexual objectification, but they might be shown with ladies. This can be to make them seem more popular or liked, the fan (mostlikley male) will look up to the artist thinking they get all the girls and start to associate thermselves with them. A good example of this is Rap/R&B artist's music videos such as Snoop Dogg (video shown below) or Pitbull.

In Snoop Dogg's video he is shown surrounded by hot girls, who are all over him, the video also features bikini clad girls dancing withouth the main artist, Snoop's male fans would enjoy seeing the fragmented body shots of the girls alone while also thinking how cool he is that he has all these ladies at his disposal.



 

Snoop Dogg vs David Guetta - Sweat






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