R&B music videos generally feature coded conventions around gender. Males are often shown topless to appeal to female audiences, and tattoos are portrayed as cool. Females usually wear minimal clothing and heels to look perfect and attract male viewers. Hair and makeup is flawless. The videos and lyrics are often sexually provocative. However, some artists are breaking conventions by showing more control and power, such as Cassie wearing more covered clothing in "Numb".

1. R&B music video
codes and
conventions

2. Males.
In the males of the r&b music industries videos
We see a lot of them topless, this is because
they are aimed at female audiences and especially
young female audiences.
Tattoos are also extremely common in this
industry and in the music videos they portray
them as something very cool, this may be a
reason for tattoos becoming such a big part of
todays society.

3. Females
In these music videos the females usually wear minimal
clothing in order to get the attention of the males who would
watch their music videos, an example of this is Beyoncé's
video ‘Dance for you’ where she is wearing a very short dress
that shows her underwear. They usually wear high heels to
ensure their bodies look perfect. The only times this can be
broken is if the artist is dancing. This can be seen in Cassie’s
video ‘ official girl’ and Ciara’s music video for ‘Like a boy’.
The hair and makeup is usually very flawless and made up.
This is because they need to show themselves as being
perfect in the eyes of the viewer.

4. Iconography
Most r&b music videos that males make are
extremely sexual as the lyrics tend to be rather
sexual and provocative, we see this is Chris
brown’s video for ‘take you down’ this is also a
video which shows him topless which makes all
the girls scream. This shows that males do
these things to get the attention of the females
watching their music videos.
Females don’t fall behind with this sexual content as they
are seen in minimalistic clothing dancing sensually to also
attract the opposite sex. Their music videos are very easy
to be seen through the eyes of a heterosexual male as we
tend to watch it as if we were seeing it through their eyes.
This can also be broken in recent videos where the
females show themselves in a different light by acting
more in control and being more covered up, we can see
this in Cassie’s video for Numb where she is wearing
clothes that cover her up a lot more than her older
videos.

5. Breaking codes and conventions
Lots of artists want to break the codes and
conventions that have been set. A lot of females
have done this by trying to not dress extremely
seductively and showing themselves as
powerful, we see an example of this in
Beyoncé's video ‘irreplaceable’.