Project Description:

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This paper is a semiotic analysis of the Axe Corporation’s advertisement displayed above. The content discusses the visual culture of hypermasculinity through a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of one of the advertising industry’s most notorious culprit, Axe. It was written for a course at Toronto Metropolitan University titled Introduction to Visual Culture.

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Thesis:​

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Axe’s body spray and shower gel are the brand’s most recognizable commercial products, and they target the average man’s heterosexual desire by providing imagery of “emasculated” men alongside highly sexualized women who do not think of him as a “man.” Axe’s body spray ad’s syntagmatic meaning indicates that their product will overcome an emasculated man’s chances of being categorized as a companion, in favour of being seen as a worthwhile candidate for sexual intercourse with stereotypically gorgeous women. Furthermore, the image’s paradigmatic meaning suggests that Axe’s body spray can be a fetishistic substitute for male consumers who lack hypermasculine traits, and since we are conditioned to think that women are attracted to hypermasculinity, this logic rationalizes the excessive consumption and fetishizing of unnecessary products to attract the opposite sex.

To read more about my analysis of Axe’s advertisement, please download a copy of my paper for yourself.