Post #2 The Male Gaze (Julia Dwyer)

Julia Dwyer

POST 2 - On ways of seeing/viewing

The male gaze represents more than just the act of the man gazing upon the woman, it is a pervasive form of vision in popular culture because it represents the systematic gender imbalance that has always existed in our society. The act of a man gazing upon a woman denotes his superiority over her by his right to do so, it also puts man in an active position and women in a passive position. The male gaze is the sexual objectification of women for the viewing pleasure of heterosexual males. This vision isn’t just limited to popular culture, it invades every aspect of our lives when it comes to gender politics.

[As a period TV show, Mad Men offers a glimpse into the sexism women had to endure in the 60’s & 70’s]

Judith Butler astutely described gender as being “performative”; we take on our respective roles as a man or a woman and perform as such. It is not just men that participate in the male gaze, women participate (after deep psychological conditioning to do so) by essentially watching themselves being watched by men. While men simply act with only themselves in mind, women are constantly performing and assessing how they are being perceived by the male gaze. John Berger explores this in ‘Ways of Seeing’: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.” (46) A large part of how some woman see themselves is largely tied to how they are appreciated by the male gaze. By this logic only men get to do things for their own sake, while women only do things for the perception of doing them; Berger simplifies this by saying “men act and women appear”. (47)

Art, Film, TV and advertising are all guilty of catering to the male gaze. Berger honed in male gaze in art, displaying nude paintings of women solely focused on catering to male sexuality with zero focus on a woman’s sexuality. In most of these nudes women appear to have no body hair whatsoever, a cultural standard of female beauty that still exists today and is solely tied to male domination: “Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion. Women are there to feed an appetite, not have any of their own.” (55) This is a fascinating representation of our willingness to cater to male preference; women to this day spend hundreds of dollars and undergo painful waxing and laser treatments for no other reason than to cater to a male-preferred aesthetic.

[A regular shaving regiment in required to be a “goddess” embraced by men]

Mainstream narrative film has long been a breeding ground for the male gaze, as the role of a viewer is perfectly encapsulated in the medium. It is not just a matter of sexual objectification, but also a matter of female characters being one dimensional, and only experienced as an extension of the hetero-male protagonist. In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey references a quote made by Budd Boetticher: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance”. (837) The person watching the film is a surrogate spectator for the male protagonist, viewing the female character only as a one-dimensional, sexualized object within his own story. Through the flooding of Film, Television and advertisements in everyday life,  women learn the ideal which is expected of them and begin a process of self-objectification at a very young age. In the following article, Dr. Tara Well explores the process by which young girls acquire knowledge of the ‘social currency’ attached to their objective appearance.(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-clarity/201711/taking-back-the-male-gaze)

Bell Hooks discusses ‘The Oppositional Gaze’ as a confrontational reaction by African-American Women to the white male gaze, and their lack of representation in mainstream entertainment. She goes back to the racially charged origin of this created by power dynamics during slavery, where black slaves were not allowed the right to directly gaze at their white owners, and especially not at white womanhood. She says that this denial of a right to gaze created even more of a longing to look; “a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.’” While African-American women appeared in some mainstream film and television, it was usually only as a means to “enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze” (119). This lack of proper representation drove the creation of independent black cinema, which engaged with three-dimensional African-American characters, not centered around the white male gaze.  

Works Cited:

Mulvey, Laura (1999) "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford UP: Edition. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen.

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

Berger, John (1972). "Ways of Seeing." London: BBC Enterprises.