Ways of Seeing/Viewing

          The male gaze is a term that was coined by Laura Mulvey, and is the overtly sexualized way that women are portrayed in media. Their depiction is through the male’s eyes, and used as a way for men to receive pleasure. "The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on the female figured which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so they can connote to-be-look-at-ness,” Mulvey explains in her Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema essay (387). Through the male gaze, women in media are portrayed in an unrealistic representation, not relatable for the majority of women.

            John Berger explores the male gaze in early European paintings in his book Ways of Seeing. A male painter would  paint a nude of a female, simply for his own pleasure. Often times, he would paint her with a male lover (who is more covered up than she.) But the woman ‘s attention is never on her lover, but on the spectator. This allows the spectator to have ownership over the women. She was painted simply to give pleasure to the spectator. It’s a type of private pornography especially for the spectator, whose ownership over the woman gives him a sense of flattery. “In the average European oil painting of a nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear as a result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger with his clothes still on,” (Mulvey 54.)

The male gaze is a pervasive form of vision in popular culture, especially since men (mostly white men) control Hollywood. We see the male gaze in magazines, such as Playboy, a magazine for men filled with photos of pin-up women. In movies, when older, out of shape, not very attractive man always seems to have a beautiful wife. And in TV shows as well. Growing up I used to watch the 90’s sitcom Home Improvement. In the show, the protagonist Tim Taylor co-host an actual home improvement show with another man. In this show, they had an assistant named Heidi (in early seasons this role was played by Pamela Anderson.) The relevance of Heidi always confused me as a child. Why did they need this character? To me she made no impact to the show, she didn’t drive the plot at all. She was this pin-up girl; in skimpy clothes handing the men tools which they could’ve easily gotten on their own. But the male gaze created her, and felt the show needed her, because they needed something pleasurable to look at. And it’s a sort of inception, because not only were the creators of Home Improvement infected with the male gaze, the creators of Tool Time within the show Home Improvement were infected too.

Heidi, the unneeded assistant for Tool Time.

In her essay The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators, Bell Hooks describes the power of a gaze. "The ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally... In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating ‘awareness’ politicizes ‘looking’ relations-- one learns to looks a certain way to resist.” (Bell hooks 116.) The oppositional gaze was developed as a way for repressed blacks to resist white supremacy. An influencer to its creation, was the fact that slaves could be punished for looking at their slave owners (the power of a gaze.) The oppositional gaze developed because of the portrayal of black women in film. Black women were portrayed in only a few different dehumanizing ways, and the oppositional gaze was used to counter these depictions created by the white males of Hollywood. Bell hooks gives the example of Sapphire from Amos ‘n’  Andy. “She was even then backdrop, foil. She was a bitch—nag,” (120.)

These gazes have been present in media my entire life, yet I never noticed it until having to read about it for class. Nothing seemed wrong about women’s portrayal in media for me, because that’s how we were always portrayed. Reading about the male gaze and the oppositional gaze opened up my mind to notice these portrayals in media all around me. It causes a dislike in me for media I use to innocently enjoy. It shows me how poorly women really are treated and represented. And as a woman, it hurts to know that men are taking such advantage of us. But what hurts the most is realizing that men in the media, who I used to enjoy, are perpetrators. But Bell hooks reading is also empowering, because it helped me realize that I can identify as a resister against the male gaze.

Bibliography:

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin, 2008. Print.

Hooks, Bell. Blacks Looks : Race and Representation. N.p.: Boston South End, 1992. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminisms (1991): 432-42. Print.