> Sorry, what point? The first thing that comes to mind is that the presenter wants to communicate that the tech is sexy.

That kind of imagery is made for a male gaze and is oriented towards straight men, so how exactly does that convey sexy to a room full of people of different gender and different orientations? (hint: it doesn't and using that kind of imagery is very sexist and alienating)

I don't disagree that male gaze is a problem. But if you pick up anything targeted at women, they also use women to denote sexy things. So I don't think it's alienating. And why would it be degrading?

Advertising aimed for male gaze vs. advertising that attempts to sell to women are a bit different. For male gaze advertisement, women are reduced to an ownable sex object, typically parts of their face will be hidden or out of frame. You'll also see ads where the actual product is turned into a women or made to look like a women (for a media definition of a women looks like, in any case). Ads targeted towards women use other women to try and sell you the product so you can achieve what the ad represents the woman having.

In both cases, the ads are alienating. In male gaze ads women are explicitly not desired except as an object, so there's a very direct alienation there. For advertising selling to women, the ads serve to highlight elements that a women should have or is missing to in order to be the ideal, which is alienating as there is no such thing as an ideal women and everyone's needs are different.

I mentioned it earlier, but Killing Us Softly is a nice video lecture that covers a lot of this kind of material (this link is trailer only, I'm afraid): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY