In a world ordered in sexual imbalance, pleasure of looking has been split
between the active male and the passive female"
- Laura Mulvey
[re arranged]
Laura Mulvey expresses her thoughts that females are represented in music videos to cater for the men on and off screen.
Although many music videos don't apply to this, there are a worryingly large number that do.
This could be because it gains a lot of attention from the audience (Blurred Lines) or because the music videos theme ties into the genre it's depicting.
Hip-Hop & R&B are the most popular for doing this in their videos.
Key Videos
[Hip-Hop]
As you can maybe see from the endless amounts of GIF's the men in this video are clothed pretty well. Starting with all black, wearing vests and jeans to getting classier wearing buttoned up shirts and jackets the video see's all the men (Asap Rocky/Drake/2Chainz/Kendrick
Lamar) having a grand old time waving their arms in motion rapping.
They are dressed this way because they know their target audience are teenagers, predominantly males, so they want to show off by wearing a lot of clothing. The less clothing they wear the more jewellery they can show e.g. vest with gold chains. The more clothing they wear the less jewellery they wear e.g. shirt & jacket.
The girls in this video don't really do much. Sometimes they're together and sometimes they're on their own but they mainly stare at the camera and dance. Occasionally they'll have a chair or a hat but that's about it.
This is because the focus of the video has to remain on the rappers, therefore the girls are there for a bit of show.
This is proven when the girls do get screen time, for a few seconds the camera will show some sitting/dancing/staring then 2chainz will appear waving his arms around. This is to re-enforce the main focus.
The girls arn't wearing much because that's what Asap's audience (young teenage boys) want to see, and the rappers don't mind doing it.
Pop/R&B
She is seen wearing a white vest and shorts, then in a dress. For pop and R&B standards that's very respectable. Jay-Z is wearing a shirt, another shirt, jeans and a hat, typical for a rapper.
Both arn't going over the top as although this was before they where both on the insane success level they're on now, they arn't known for being 'too revealing' or 'douchey'
Old School
Some people have argued that over time society has become more accustomed to the 'male gaze', and you could be right. Look at Cher. In her biggest song ever, the music video has very little revealing clothes. Take a popular pop star now: Gaga/Rihanna/Katy Perry/Mariah most of them do wear revealing those's, but Madonna also does that so really it depends on the person no matter how downhill society gets.
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