Feminism

Pixie Lott in FHM's music issue

Laura Mulvey created the theory called the male gaze in 1975. The gaze is how an audience views the people presented on a magazine. For feminists it can be looked at in three different ways; how men look at women, how women look at themselves and how women see other women. Mulvey thought that women played a passive part and men played an active part in any advertisement, women were seen as objects, Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic. 
Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has has associations with sadism: ‘pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt', turning someone into an object to make them beautiful. 
Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. Women are often treated as an object, an example of this was Marilyn Monroe who was celebrated for her looks but got pressured by the media to becoming the perfect icon.

Nicole Scherzinger in Blender

In 2010, Lady Gaga's Q magazine photo shoot was deemed too racy and was banned in the US and in 2009 Lily Allens Q photo shoot was also seen as too provocative. When NME saw this they thought to challenge the attention and chose feminist and music artist Beth Ditto to model, this went against the social conventions and people were shocked and this was the reaction wanted. 

'Men don't know what it feels like to be a woman and be expected to look a particular way,' the Gossip star tells NME.
 Unlike these pictures of Nicole Schersinger and Pixie Lott which are expected nowadays from 'skinny' role models, Ditto's photo shoot was a statement, an objectification masquerading as empowerment. Ditto carries on by saying "I popped into my local Co-Op this morning to buy a loaf and I couldn't help notice that all the copies of this week's NME were turned backwards. I asked the manager if this was a matter of policy and he confirmed it was. "There's been a dozen complaints already," he said. 

Beth Ditto in NME in 2009 and in LOVE in 2010