The Gaze

Claudia Fareri

Woman and Media

Doris Caçoilo

25 Feb 2017

Being a woman, especially a woman of color, holds many hardships in a world that roots for the white male but turns a blind eye for anyone else. Being a woman is like trying to win a race but your opponent received a five second head start, each and every time. In all aspects of a woman’s life, she comes second best in a patriarchal system that encourages and regurgitates the same skewed ideals of women's purpose in life, which is the please men. In order to combat this system, the first thing to do is educate oneself and those around you about it. In doing so, terms such as the ‘male gaze’ and ‘oppositional gaze’ come up and are important aspects to learn; it is the first step in recognizing how our identities have been shaped in society by the patriarchal system and how we can reverse it.

The ‘male gaze’ is a term describing how the way a woman acts and is viewed in the world is through the eyes of a masculine point of view and only for the benefit of men. According to John Berger in his novel Ways of Seeing, a woman “has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as success of her life” (46). Berger describes the role in which women play in society. Men hold the ultimate dominating power; it is through them that women seek success or value in her life. Women are held to high standards and must fulfill them by constantly observing herself and her actions because her worth is determined only by how she is seen. In all forms of culture, we see this idea play out countless times. Television shows like The Bachelor fuel the idea of the male gaze. Each contestant on the show must compete against one another to win the heart of a bachelor. These women must act in the right way, talk in the right way, and look the right way in order to bypass the next girl and avoid being eliminated - all for the sake of the bachelor's approval. If done right, this women will become the 'winner'' of the season and get the success bestowed upon her from the man she was trying to please.

The Bachelor 2017: Thirty contestants ready to win the heart of Nick Viall.

This type of thinking has dated back to the Renaissance. During this time period, women were painted in the nude by male painters, who never included themselves in the picture. Instead, the painter paints as though “everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity” (Berger, 54). From the earliest forms of media, men have used women to their advantage and labeled them as objects. they have projected this idea that women are only there for a man's satisfaction. Over time, this mentality has been carried down to this day and age. As Bell Hooks describes it in her novel Understanding Patriarchy, he explains how "patriarchal thinking shapes the values of our culture. We are socialized into this system, females as well as males" (23). It is something that has been considered ‘the norm’ for centuries, which is why it is still evident in popular culture and hard to question. Even those who are deemed as feminists have once fallen under the trap of the male gaze; Beyonce's music video for her song "Why Don't You Love Me" is a prime example of this. In the music video, she prances around in seductive outfits while doing house chores such as cleaning windows, doing laundry, and attempting to fix a broken car. All the while, Beyonce is staring intently at the camera while shaking her butt, grabbing her boobs and biting her finger. She sings “I got beauty, I got class/I got style, and I got ass/And you don't even care to care” and then questions “Why don't you love me?/Tell me, baby, why don't you love me when I make me so damn easy to love?” Just like with the nude paintings from the Renaissance, Beyonce is acting the way she is for the male spectator behind the camera, trying to please him to get him to love her, like how she wishes in the song. She sings about how she is pretty and desirable so why isn’t she loved? This illustrates how Beyonce is objectifying herself and in turn, promoting the male gaze.
On the other hand, oppositional gaze was a term coined by Bell Hooks. She used it synonymously with “an overwhelming long to look” and “a rebellious desire” (116). It was used to describe the way people of color resisted against mainstream movies that only featured white people and therefore the engagement of the negation of black people. For a long time, people of color weren’t able to look at white people so the ability to gaze was a chance to see the one sided world around them and form their own resistance against it. But even then, woman of color faced their own issues. When “representations of black women were present in film, our bodies and being were there to serve” (Hooks, 199). Woman all over dealt with the same issue of being only objects for men. As Laura Mulvey explains it in her novel Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, “The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (837). In film, a women’s character holds no value or importance. Her character is only to be seen as a spectacle such as a show and if anything, become a distraction for the protagonist.

The male gaze and the oppositional gaze (more so the male gaze) have been structures that I’ve began to understand on my own, without realizing what they were called. However, reading more about it has made me more critical about what is shown in media and the type of content I engage in. My role for myself is to live my own life and to do whatever makes me happy, but many times the things I do are rooted from the idea of the male gaze such as shaving. Learning about these structures has given me a chance to reevaluate the motives behind my actions and put myself in check.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Chapters 2, 3. Ways of Seeing:. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Hooks, Bell. In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992: 115-131.

Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books, 2004: 17-33.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44.