The male gaze

The Male Gaze

                   When I was a kid, growing up my brother and I used to play video games. Our favorite game to play on PS2 was SmackDown vs Raw. We loved that game so much. We used our favorite wrestlers to fight against each and we would even team up to fight the computers. The best part about the game was being able to create your own wrestling characters. We created a lot of wrestler in the game. We were able to create female wrestlers as well. That was my favorite thing to do. The female wrestlers I created, were all tall, fair skin, and curvy. I would dress them up in short and tight clothes. I don’t know I gravitated to creating female wrestlers, I guess it was a way of like playing with Barbie dolls. However, I didn’t realize what I was doing partaking in the male gaze.

                        I was creating female wrestlers based on what I found attractive. Some of the females characters I created wore two pieced bathing suits and lingerie. This a perfect example of the male gaze. The male gaze is the perspective of a heterosexual male, their perspectives over-sexualize women in media and in literature the male gaze is pervasive in other forms of visual arts because men hold the highest positions in media platforms. For example, DC and Marvel comic books. Both comic books company were created by men. The creators of these comic books created some of the best superheroes we have today male and female. However, I noticed that the female superheroes in these comic books are extremely attractive. Think about it. All the female superheroes and villains are slender, busty and have modelesque looks.  Their costumes are tight and revealing It is rare that you will see an overweight and unattractive female superheroes and villains. What the comic book creators did was create female superheroes base on what they thought their audience would enjoy and love. Their audiences were young men and boys at the time.

                        As a man, it is a pleasure looking at attractive people in comic books and other sources of media. The pleasure of looking is also known as scopophilia. According to Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. She states “There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at”pg835. I agree with Mulvey looking is a great pleasure, however, I think it’s the way you process what and who you are looking at that can determine if you are participating in the male gaze. Because I can look at a woman on a street, in a library or in a movie and say she’s attractive but not just base on her appearance. But the way how they speak, think and what they have plans for in the future. I don’t think appearance is everything especially when comes to women. I guess it because I’m a gay man. So obviously I’m not attracted to women. However, their heterosexual men who look beyond a women appearance and appreciate her for who she is and think it a pleasure to look at her.

            Going back to female wrestlers and superheroes, as you can see the male gaze is extremely present. When I think about female wrestlers I think of some my favorites wrestling female wrestler Trish Stratus. She held the women champions title a couple of times and had the best memorable moment in the ring. However, some of the other female wrestlers she went up against in the ring, she didn’t have to pin them down for three seconds to win a match. A lot of matches she has won were Bra and Panties matches. Where the female’s wrestler would snatch each article of clothing off each other and who was in their bra and panties first would lose the match. When I was a kid playing Raw vs SmackDown on PS2 this was my favorite match to play. My brother would his favorite female wrestler and I would pick Trish Stratus and we enjoyed stripping the wrestlers to their bras and panties. At the time I didn’t realize how these women in video games and in the wrestling industry were being over sexualized for the male audience. Just like female superheroes, as I mention before female superheroes are mostly wearing revealing costumes that are showing off their curves for the male audience. I believe there are different levels to the male gaze especially, towards women in color in our media. Especially, comic book characters.

            Trish Stratus Bra & Panties Match

Figure 1 Jean Grey in the 60’s

I noticed how in the comic book series X-men in the 1960’s, Jean Grey a might mutant is wearing a blue and yellow bodysuit with the X-men logo on it, the suit is plain and simple, and I forgot to mention, she is white. Ten years later in 1970, Storm joins the X-men team, who is a mutant from Africa. Her costume is extremely revealing. She’s practically wearing a two-piece bathing suit with a cape draping from neck to cover her backside.

Figure 2 Storm in the 70's

According to Berger “Women are depicted in quite different way from men- not because the feminine is different from the masculine-but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him”pg 64. As you can I agree with Berger, women in didn’t forms of media spectators has always been males from the comic books to the wrestling industry. I wonder if the male spectators ever wonder what their harmful depictions of women in our media can do the next generations of girls and boys.