The Representation Of Women In The Riptide Music Video.

The Representation Of Women In The Riptide Music Video.

Sexualisation- To make something sexual in character or quality, or to become aware of sexuality, especially in relation to men and women. Sexualization is linked to sexual objectification.

Objectification- He act of treating a person, or sometimes an animal, as an object or a thing. It is part of vulnerable, the act of disavowing the humanity of others.

Dehumanisation- The practice of gaining sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity. 

Male gaze- The perspective of a notionally typical heterosexual man considered as embodied in the audience or intended audience for films and other visual media, dehumanisation by a tendency to objectify or characterised women.

Scopophilia- Sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.

Representation is a powerful tool used by producers to encode meaning.

Discuss the representation of women in the music video Riptide by Vance Joy.

Some of the things I would talk about when answering this question are:

• Women are shown as being vunerable and have been represented as the "damsel in distress" 
• This image shows a middle class white woman who appears to be in her late 30's, early 40's
• As well as this, the camera is extremely close up to the woman, making her uncomfortable. 
• The video is strange and has more link to the lyrics rather than using the video to create a story, nothing works together.
• The women in this video are always shown to be in some sort of pain or distress. 
• A lot of the shots of these women focus on their hands and feet which dehumanises them because we are not allowed to know anything about these women. 
• The video uses irony to share their message on how women are represented in the by overly objectifying them and making them media. 

The music viedo Riptide uses women to share their message about the negative representation of women in the media. The video purposfully objectifies women, making it obvious for the audience to see, so that they can understand how unfair this representation is. 

One way in which Riptide's music video represents women is by focusing a lot of their shots on the woman's hands or feet. This has been done to dehuminise the woman because she is not given an identity and we as the audience are not allowed to find out anything about her. The producers of the music video have encoded this information because they want to make the audience more aware that women in the media are often over looked and identify second to their male counterparts. In contrast to this, the men in the music video are only shown in head shots or full body shots. This implies that the men are more important and have been allowed to have an identity. This ideology is similar to the of Lisbet Van Zoonen and her feminist theory which states "In patriarchal culture, the way women’s bodies are represented as objects is different to the representation of male bodies as a spectacle." Her theory applies to the music video because of the fact that the woman have been represented unfairly, with many close up shots focused on their hands an feet, as apposed to how the men hae been represented with full body and head shots. In final analysis, it can also be said that the music video subverts to stereotypes of the representation of women in the media because they have not sexualised her body in most of these shots. While it can be said that taking away full body shots of the woman has been used to dehumanise her, it can also be said that this technique has been imposed to take away some of the objectification from women by not showing their bodies as sex objects.