The Man - Taylor Swift music video

 Gender representation 800 words

sexualisation 

Masculinity in women as Taylor dresses like a male and does things that a male would do - millionaire, rich, one night stands, high job role 

e.g The main ways the videos represent gender  e.g women as victim , man as bully

The use of and any ways of challenging stereotypes

Challenging or following audience expectations about genre, the artist , narrative etc.

Specific and relevant examples from the videos , focusing on technical codes such as camera shots, lighting and colour ,costume and body language , conventions of music video such as artist performance and the  artist's star profile or persona  

comparison of riptide and the man 

In this analysis, i will be discussing the way that women are portrayed as a victim in the music video 'Riptide' by Vance Joy, and how the male gender is represented as the bully in the music video 'The Man' by Taylor Swift. I will be further discussing how both of these representations are intertwined with the other music video.

In Riptide, women can be seen as the victim throughout. This is because at the start of of the music video, we can see a woman who is sitting in the dark and she looks like she is restrained and afraid. This directly follows on with the lyric "I was scared of dentist's and the dark" which directly addresses the narrative of the video. Also, we see at numerous points a woman who at first is singing the lyrics perfectly, she is smiling and her makeup is neatly done on her face - however as we see her as the music video progresses, we see her appearance and facial expressions change gradually as she is seen with her lipstick smeared and bruises on her face to then grabbing hold of her neck with blood on her hands while having tears running down her face. We also notice she starts singing the words wrong as the lyric says "you're gonna sing the words wrong." From this alone, we can interpret that the woman was a victim of domestic abuse because the injuries don't look self-inflicted due to her state. Here, especially in that last shot of her, we can already understand that the woman was a victim in this video because of how her character development disintegrates through the music video.

The shots of this particular woman is shot in a darkish setting where only the top half of her is seen along with a bright light that is focussing on her face like she is the star of the video or performance. The light that is used is a bright white light which could possibly indicate that she is the innocent victim because the colour white gives connotations of purity, and we can infer that she was completely innocent in the violent attack.  

According to Wikipedia, the story of Riptide was described as "coming of age love story" and that the title was inspired by a motel the artist Vance Joy went to as a child. However, this completely differs to what we can interpret from the video as no love whatsoever is represented and in fact it is the opposite of love. It is the sexualisation and violence of women. 

In the music video for Taylor Swift's 2020 hit "The Man", men are seen as the the bully and the prestige gender. This is seen within the first minute of the song as we can see the male reading a paper and carelessly scrunching it up and throwing it and then being so demanding toward his co-workers as he comes to their faces and starts clapping and acting very rude. Then, the scene shifts to him sitting between two women with one arm on top of the older lady's arm who looks highly uncomfortable. He is also smoking a cigar that effects another woman and the camera focusses on her for a brief moment just to show her coughing because of the smoke. Then, the older woman that is sitting beside him on his right has her bag open and he uses that to doubt the ash from his cigar. Then, the man kind of slants onto the other woman as he opens his newspaper. On the newspaper, we can see a headline saying "For real men with thirst" and under, another heading saying "It's men against boys and no ladies around." Here, that gender stereotype already talks about the male gender being the alpha of the society and that women are pretty much just there for the housework and sex. Continuing on, we can see that the woman is very annoyed with the man who obviously doesn't care and he uses her as an object or trash even because he just carelessly dumped a piece of the newspaper on the woman who again looks highly agitated.

We notice though, none of the women do or say anything about his behaviour, potentially showing it's because they're weak to do so as females. I think this was deliberately all put in here to express Taylor Swift's view on men, inferring she thinks they have no respect for women and they can do whatever they want because they are the dominate gender. I also think she is acting as a voice for other women who feel the same and it's almost as if she's trying to tell the men that things like that aren't tolerated because it's treating women inhumanly. 

When the man (played by Taylor Swift) gets off the train, we see him casually urinating on the wall and he spells out the title of the song. Personally, I would be disgusted by that and I think the director of the video was trying to have that as their aim as a possible message to men that doing things such as these is no way to act because it is completely gross and even immature. 

In both music videos, there are elements of sexualisation. In 'Riptide', there's a woman being secretly filmed as she takes off her swimsuit. You can't see her face which is also depersonalising women because it's as though they are saying that it is the body that is the most attractive thing on a woman. In 'The Man', the main star of the entire video is later seen in a yacht with numerous girls, showing off how rich he is and it's almost as if he's showing them off like he's won them like a trophy. Also, they are wearing a gold-yellow bikini which kind of colours them as though they are shiny trophies.