Question 11

Two Texts
Stabile – “Nike, Social Responsibility, and the Hidden abode of Production”
Breazeale – “In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer”

The Burger King ad comes from Maxim magazine, which is a male-viewed magazine. The ad is very masculine as seen by almost every element. Everything from the copy, to the position of the woman and sandwich, to the face the woman is making is making the ad very sexual which in turn makes the ad masculine. Like many other ads in male-viewed magazines, this ad shows the woman as an object and not as a person; they are solely a sex symbol to gain the attraction of a male. This ad also helps confirm one of Breazeale’s arguments about how Esquire magazine (also a male-viewed magazine) “by definition confronted the popular periodical industry and its attendant arena of marketing culture with a very different premise—that women as women have no legitimate social role to play” (p234). She also argued that what Esquire “convinced itself that what men are truly ‘in the market’ for is status achieved at the expense of women” (p240), which leads men to feeling more masculine because it makes them feel like they have more power and dominance. Nike has always been a very large company, and they have multiple branches of apparel and shoes that they target to different consumers. Stabile argues that Nike has become so successful because the company has become very good at “reach[ing] a target audience” (p199). This is very similar to almost every company that advertises in male-viewed magazines such as Maxim because they show their target consumers what they want (a form of masculinity in many cases) in order to sell the largest amount of their product. It is sad that women are sometimes objectified to get a product sold, but in today’s world, it is all about money.