Post 2 - Male & Oppositional Gazes

In most forms of media, the narratives of television, film, literature and even music are rife with the male gaze; a pervasive form of creating and consuming media through a male-centric eye. Viewers, listeners, and spectators of all sorts have been conditioned to absorb media through this lens, in which in every form men are seen as the subjects and women as the objects. The male gaze, as the name entails, appeals to the male fantasy and the dichotomy of viewing. In this division, "active males" impose their ideals onto the "passive females" -- women through this lens are meant to be pleasurable to the male eye (Mulvey, 837). Women are the beauty, and men, the beholder who take action in the object. This concept goes back as far as (if not even further) most classical literature; even the bible making the male gaze both the result of and the perpetuator of patriarchal society for more than two millennia.

Practices, beliefs, and norms that in contemporary time are deemed problematic and toxic by a critical eye have already been normalized to the masses through years of repetition, consistency, and corroboration. It's this process that allows for "passive male absorption of sexist ideology [that] enables men to falsely interpret this behavior positively" (Hooks, Understanding Patriarchy 4). Criticisms -- no matter how forgiving or truthful -- is immediately seen as inciteful. Consumers' ideas of men and women are prominently based on what they consume. When men and women are grossly misrepresented, it creates harmful expectations and denominations of everyone within that binary.

a British recruitment poster for WWI (1915)

Men are meant to be "stoic", emotionally silent, and strong providers. A man who doesn't go to war for instance, is immediately demonized by the government and the public regardless of their inhibitions or priorities at home (Kimmel 8). Meanwhile, male victims of sexual or domestic abuse are virtually invisible if not for divergent movements for them against societal norms (Kimmel 9).

With women, the issue is far more egregious. Having women portrayed as the objects of a medium enforces the longstanding belief of a good woman being seen and not heard, only speaking when spoken to, and being a pawn or tool for a man. When these views seep out of popular media, the result is half of the population expecting the other half to be their inferior. There is far more power in being the spectator than the spectated.

Bell Hooks understood this when talking about the oppositional gaze, a counterpart to a gaze that systematically objectified women and dehumanized minorities. "Black looks" as stated by her, "were interrogating looks" that gave a safe way to analyze and scrutinize whites; through a screen (Hooks, The Oppositional Gaze 249). Viewers understood the context of the media they consumed and were critical of it. It was not only how one gazed that gave power to looking, but what one chose to look at. Averting eyes away from mainstream media and towards less commercial independent producers of color had equally as much power.

The oppositional gaze, as controversial as it was at the time of its conception, is something I realize was taught to me through various film/media courses over the year. Understanding context, auteur's intent, and the hivemind behind mass media production is what allows us to be critical of potentially problematic content. We find harmful tropes in seemingly acceptable movies, and even things like the average fairy tale character structure is rooted in sexism. But without consciousness of these devices we as viewers would either become jaded with media that stands any bit short of perfect, or worse, a passive, accepting consumer of the demoralizing, derogatory, and imbruting system this society has kept in place for lifetimes.