In this essay I am going to argue the fact that females are represented in a pessimistic way in comparison to males. I will be exploring issues in both prints about how they present the dominant male and female. In Tomb Raider Lara Croft is made to look like an attractive girl. This is the gender typical stereotype people have for a ‘perfect woman’. In comparison to this in Men’s Health Vin Diesel is made to look like a muscular man which is presented as the dominant ideology of what men should look like. In my opinion I would say that Men’s Health is a reactionary text because of the muscles and all the cover lines, “blast body fat”, “new year muscle”, whereas Tomb Raider is more of a radical text because even though Lara Croft is sexualised, she is portrayed as a woman that is involved with intense combat and she carries guns and weapons which is not what we associate woman to have.
A difference between the two pieces of media is that the game cover presents a constructed reality, whereas Men’s Health shows a real person. This could be used as evidence to support the idea that the expectations of society for the appearance of females is more unrealistic and unattainable, meaning the only way to represent this cartoonish ideal is through the use of constructed reality, as it simply doesn’t exist within the real world.
While some might say that a heavily sexualised protagonist or front cover image is a necessity to achieve high sales in the respective industries, sales figures show that most of the highest selling games and magazines do not follow this trend. For example, the highest selling video game of all time is Minecraft, followed by Tetris and a variety of Nintendo games including Mario and Pokemon. None of these games feature a protagonist similar to Lara Croft, and yet they have far exceeded the Tomb Raider games in terms of sales.
Many would say that this is far more harmful than the presentation of Lara Croft, as even though she is stylised to be perhaps unrealistic and unattainably attractive she is never presented as a societal norm within the game, nor is the game intended to be viewed as realistic, as evidenced by the scene of her fighting a dinosaur on the back of the cover. Furthermore, within the game when other human characters do feature, they are not presented in the same way as Lara. Instead, they are more often realistic deceptions of normal people.
The same can be said for magazines; the highest selling magazines of all time include National Geographic, Better Homes and Gardens, Food Network Magazine, and Popular Science. Only one magazine, The Cosmopolitan, out of the 20 highest selling magazines regularly features highly sexualised people on their cover.
This evidence suggests that the idea that society demands and expects the heavily sexualised representation of both males and females to be false, in fact the sales of magazines and video games denote the opposite to be true. Because of this, games like Tomb Raider and magazines like Men’s Health seem to be unnecessarily unrealistic and perpetuate harmful ideologies to society as a whole for no apparent reason other than the preferences of the creators of said texts.
In conclusion I think that media platforms such as Tomb Raider and Men’s Health use what I would consider, quite harsh and terrible ways to control their audiences, by impacting and controlling consumers’ confidence desires, and anxieties. I think that this contributes to bad mental health being formed, just so media platforms can sell their
