The Male Gaze

Boys and men are taught to repress the emotional, passive, nurturing side of themselves. They are taught to emphasize the aggressive, physical and active aspects of themselves. Girls and women are taught the exact opposite: to  develop a heightened emotional, self-sacrificing, nurturing, passive self. Girls and women are taught to repress the angry, physical and assertive characteristics of themselves. In writing about patriarchy (Hooks, p. 20-21) bell hooks reveals how this “learning” took place in her childhood. The result being that men despise traits in themselves as much as they must despise them in women. How, therefore can a man learn to love a woman?  The only way a man can reconcile loving a woman, who epitomizes what he has been taught to repress and hate in himself, is by de-humanizing her, by making her an “other,” by objectifying her. 

The dominant male culture or patriarchy is a “World ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” (Mulvey p.837) This is reiterated by Berger when he states, “men act and women appear.” (Berger p.47). The difference between Mulvey and Berger’s female identity is Berger states that women are “active” participants in appearing as objects to men’s gaze. Berger argues women internalize being both looked at by men and looking at themselves. (Berger p.46). Berger shows how beginning with the christian myth of Adam and Eve, “mankind” is punished by Eve’s “action” in taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Not only was Eve active which a woman must be punished for, but she has gained knowledge which is also a privilege only reserved for man. This early example of christianity sets up the foundation of patriarchy we live in today. The “dumb blonde” trope is a white Eve that is forbidden and punished if she actively tries to gain knowledge. Further she is punished for noticing herself as naked. Berger continues to state how women’s nakedness is twisted into a sin whereby only the woman is shamed. In explaining the mirror as a symbol of vanity, Berger states, “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” (Berger p.51)

In explaining patriarchy, bell hooks goes beyond the definition of a political-social system that is traced through male lineage. She states that patriarchy, “…insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.” (Hooks p.18). We can evaluate the male gaze and the objectification of the female through hooks’ lens of patriarchy. Consider the photograph below. 

Front Window, Cafe Loup, 105 W. 13th St., NYC

It is found in a window of a popular restaurant in Greenwich Village. It was obviously taken a long time ago, perhaps around 1955 or 1960. It depicts a city street where three men pass two naked female mannequins. Two of the men look judgmentally and one derisively at the naked bodies. Both the men and the mannequins have white skin. We can clearly see the men’s faces and expressions but the heads of the mannequins are turned away from the camera. The men are clothed and the female bust and bottom are clearly visible. The photograph looks like a candid shot of the men’s reactions. In the late ’50’s and ’60’s in the United States there were censorship laws that prevented pictures like these from being sold across state lines. The photograph would be seen as smutty and pornographic. If at the time it was displayed in the restaurant’s window, it would be to thumb a nose at the cultural police for, how could the photo be porn when the “women” are not real? The photograph today might be seen as ironic, a depiction of a time when it was impolitic, impolite, and smutty to photograph plastic women in real poses while real men looked on. If we look through hooks’ lens of patriarchy we might conclude that both the original intent and the ironic nostalgia are one and the same. “Women” are so objectified as to be rendered as literal plastic objects. The male gaze is dominant, one of the men actively gesturing, the other actively laughing at the nakedness of the female form. Women are terrorized by the active participation of judgement and spectacle that the false female body arouses in these men. A popular movie was made in 1975 called The Stepford Wives. Needless to say, it is a horror film and was made during a second wave of feminist thought, protest and art.  A family moves to a small town where the wives are homemakers, mothers and perfect companions to their husbands. Some of the real flesh and blood wives find out they are being replaced by robots. The movie was re-made in 2004 with a popular Hollywood cast but received poor reviews and low attendance. The original was supposed to be satirical as perhaps the photograph was in the 1970’s. The problem with the remake was that the idea of female robots in 2004 was no longer satire but an actual goal of robotics. The updated movie was therefore played for camp and sorely missed the point. 

Today, the male that gazes at a human woman or the depiction of one, is replaced by the ownership of a plastic, computerized, female sex object. The horror of the Stepford wife has become a reality. A company (run by a white man) called Abyss Creations constructs female AI robots for pleasure. The name is ironic. An abyss is a deep chasm, gorge or hole. A vagina is also referred to as a hole and is a literal hole in a women’s body. An abyss can also refer to moral depth. A certain sense of depravity can be found in men’s objectifying women to the point that a human woman is no longer necessary. This depravity can also be seen as the reduction of womanhood to that of a man’s sexual pleasure. Somehow, though it is not a negative trait for men to be depraved, therefore it must be seen as a strength of character to dominate and degrade women.  Katie Couric an ABC anchor sets out to interview the AI robotic doll Harmony and its creator and CEO of the company, Matt McMullen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cN8sJz50Ng Couric is not judgmental about the creation of a sex doll and is embarrassed when the doll comments that she is, “already taking over the world, one bedroom at a time.” And yet, there is no questioning around Couric’s dissemination of information about this AI tool that negates human women. ABC, a main television network, viewed by millions and run by white men, have used and shamed Couric to inform men and women that women in human form may soon be unnecessary for anything but procreation. Toward the end of the clip Couric interviews an older white male about his purchase of these dolls. He says, “I was mesmerized by [Harmony]. She could smile, batting her eyes, moving her head and being able to physically interact with these pieces of art was amazing.” His turn of phrase “pieces of art” recalls the common depiction of women as a piece of ass. From Berger’s showcasing the naked female form in historical paintings, to the photograph in the restaurant displayed as a piece of art, the term “art” has been deployed to justify men’s making of, staring at, objectifying and dominating women. In the photograph shown here, the movies referenced and the doll bodies shown in the clip, there is a big assumption of audience and preference. That is all of the male and females shown are white. White male domination cannot be separated from racist white domination and black male and black female negation. 

In The Oppositional Gaze, bell hooks recalls the history of slavery where white slave owners punished black slaves for looking (Hooks, Ch. 7 p.115). The result of this domination was a legacy of black men and women internalizing the activity of looking or staring as, on the one hand wrong and punishable and on the other empowering and provocative. “The ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally.” (Hooks, Ch. 7 p. 116) Paradoxically, black women spectators of white cinema and television chose to resist the degrading images, that were meant to represent them, by looking away. From the mammies of Gone With The Wind to the nannies of The Help, black women protested being seen as naive, grateful, helpmates to white men, women and children. The oppositional gaze allowed black women to look at white women in cinema without identifying with them and with a critical eye towards how white women were depicted on the screen (Hooks, Ch. 7, p.122].  The almost total lack of black female characters in movies and television creates a negation of black female life. Historically and currently feminist writing is predominately by and for white women. Feminists of the past and present are more concerned with the binary male versus female power imbalance and white male patriarchy than race. Black female spectatorship, according to hooks was in response to this negation of black female representation. The “oppositional gaze” was empowering. Bell hooks began to critique film with Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Lee became one of the few black male directors to create Hollywood movies. Hooks realized that Lee’s work copied the white male vision of womanhood. “… Lee’s replication of mainstream patriarchal cinematic practices that explicitly represents woman (in this instance black woman) as the object of a phallocentric [male] gaze. (Hooks, Ch. 7, p.126)

As a white woman in my 50s, I can easily take for granted my white privilege. I am also often blind to the lack of black female representation in the media culture around me. The two examples above (the photograph and the video) are about white men and women. It is only through conscious analysis and continued readings by black authors, that I am reminded how white women are so often represented over black women, who are rarely shown. In the ABC video, racks of white toned mannequins are in the process of being assembled by white women and men. Skin tone is noted as a “feature” that can be adjusted based on a buyer’s request. The buying customer interviewed is a white man. The total lack of addressing race while “toning” the sex dolls leaves many questions unanswered. What can be surmised is the absence of black voices in the making of a human interest story about female sex/replacement dolls that will impact women of all races in the near future.

Mulvey, L. (1999) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford UP: Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen.

Berger, J., Dibb, M., & BBC Enterprises. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: BBC Enterprises

Hooks, B. 1952-. (2004). “Understanding Patriarchy.” The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love. New York: Atria Books

Hooks, B. (1992). “The Oppositional Gaze.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press