Video analysis by Davison

The music video for “mommae” by Jay Park exhibits several textbook examples of male gaze and objectification of women. Jay Park’s willingness to do a video like this may be in part to his own attitudes that were shaped by his American upbringing

To first understand how this music video operates from the male gaze or that of a sexually objectifying gaze it is important to understand what those terms are. Male Gaze means that the video is presented from the view of a man looking at women and serves to show the “visual dominance male onlookers exert on female bodies,” (Leet 2016, 75) and objectification serves to strip females bodies down to objects devoid of personality.

In the first 15 seconds of the video we several spit second shots of scantily clad women, either by themselves our surrounding Jay Park, but none of the shots really let us see the women entirely, and instead just focuses on their body parts. Not showing the women’s faces in shots is typical for objectifying music videos, “focusing on the body or sexual body parts, objectifying music videos depict women as mere sexual instruments to serve the pleasure of the viewer”(Karsay. Matthes, Platzer and Plinke 2018, 27). In the same time frame there is also a caption letting us know the name of the song and who it is by, super imposed on a women’s butt. These sexual images work as a form of marketing to grab people’s attention, and try and entice them to watch the rest of the video.

In the process of trying to be marketable and appealing this flashy video, with lots of quick edited shots and close up on beautiful women’s bodies invites the viewer to take part in the male gaze and objectification as well, “when viewers follow the cameras movements in a music video, if the video objectifies women, then the viewers gaze becomes an objectifying one as well.” (2018, 28) Its practically impossible not to look at shots of women’s body parts in this video since it is so prevalent.

Perhaps the clearest case of objectification in this music video is a scene where a half-naked woman is used as a table for sushi. In this shot she is reduced to a literal object, “Sexual objectification is marked by a lack of agency of the person being objectified” (Karsay. Matthes, Platzer and Plinke 2018, 28). In the video she is seen looking pretty as men walk by and pick sushi off her body.

While many k-pop videos show have intense of male gaze and objectification, “mommae” seems to be well above average when it comes to Korean videos, and we can assume that many k-pop fans found the video shocking. Jay Parks ease with doing a kind of video like this could be tied to his upbringing, being immersed in American hip hop. There have been studies that show exposure to highly sexual hip hop music videos can change attitudes of men to be more comfortable with sexually objectifying women. (Kistler and Lee, 2009)

Work Cited

Leet, Elizabeth S. 2016. Objectification, empowerment, and the male gaze in the lanval corpus. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 42 (1): 75.

Karsay, Kathrin, Jörg Matthes, Phillip Platzer, and Myrna Plinke. 2018. Adopting the objectifying gaze: Exposure to sexually objectifying music videos and subsequent gazing behavior. Media Psychology 21 (1): 27-49.

Kistler, Michelle and Lee Moon. 2009. Does Exposure to Sexual Hip-Hop

Music Videos Influence the Sexual Attitudes of College Students?, Mass Communication and

Society, 13:1, 6