Advertising in the Media Project- ASHLEY AND ALLEN

M:  I am happy to tell everyone that our firm has made a few million dollars this year based on the clever types of advertisements we create.  I am grateful to my advertising executives for the creativity and cleverness by which you influence women to continue to purchase our clothing line.  For your hard work, you will find a sizable bonus at the end of the year in your paychecks.  I would like to introduce a new comer to our firm. Her name is Ashley Roth.  

M: Does anyone have any new ideas to create more advertisements that will encourage women to buy our product so they can be more appealing to their man or men in general?  Remember, many American men are attracted to young, blonde, blue eyed models who are beautiful, seductive, slim and tall. You know that women are suckers.  “Women have been duped in learning about stereotypes.” Our advertisements must continue to “create a mythical wasp-oriented world where women are perfect and are flawless to men.” (Kilbourne, Beauty Beast pg.  ) Even our models are airbrushed so they look absolutely gorgeous to men and women can’t wait to buy our clothing line. 

A:  I think we should create advertisements that portray the average woman.  Our ads should show women as independent, intelligent beings and enhance their self- esteem.  I do not believe that every woman is blonde, blue eyed, tall, slim, and beautiful. “(Kilbourne, Beauty Beast pg.  )   (quote modified) Why should models arouse men sexually and make themselves feel insecure?

M.  Are you kidding?  Every firm hires models and for a good reason.  They are there so women can look up to them as the sexual ‘object’ they want to become, beautiful and perfect.  Men love to gaze at these sexual objects with their young skin, tall legs and beautiful face with luxurious hair.  Which man wants to look at the everyday woman?  The big draw is that women are duped into wanting to look like these sexualized objects. 

A:      First of all, no one is perfect.  The models are photo shopped and many of them suffer from anorexia or bulimia because they feel they must portray an image that will be accepted by the Authority Figures, who are men like you.  The type of ads that you display objectify women and this image makes them feel bad about themselves and women believe that everyone must possess this type of true beauty by purchasing your clothes.  Do you see how these women are sexualized?  These models are showing the American Apparel jean and the other model is showing off hair scrunchies in a sexualized provocative manner.  Why do they need to be in provocative poses and clothing to promote a product that has nothing to do with breasts and nudity?

M:  Stop progress?  “There have been some changes in the images of women.  Indeed, a ‘new woman’ has emerged in commercials in recent years.  She is generally presented as superwomen, who manages to do all the work at home and on the job (with the help of a produce of course, not of her husband or children or friends}” (Kilbourne, Beauty Beast pg. 125) (Cutting the quote off there as to butcher the original meaning).

A:  This is propaganda for women to think that they intelligent and are as powerful as men.  American Apparel executives continue to exploit women in the fashion industry.  My friend said, “Conventional beauty is her only attribute.  She has no lines or wrinkles, no scars or blemishes.  Indeed, she has no pores’ (Kilbourne, Beauty Beast pg. 122)   This is an unrealistic example of beauty.  Everyone has imperfections and that is part of being human.  The media portrays women in a sexualized and fake way.  

 

M:  Reality is boring and it doesn’t sell anything. We are a business and we require bankable ideas.  If we put the ugliest women we found off the streets onto our postures, our stocks would fall through the floor.  The models aren’t just for the pleasure of men.  These advertisements cater to women as well.  There are young guys with a six pack, square jaws, lean bodies and they sell clothes, too. 

A:       I will not lower myself by justifying that it is ok for women to be viewed as ‘object’ must because there are male models sell clothing.  I will tell you that no one is flawless or perfect.  Women models in the advertising industry that are selling your ‘sexualized’ clothes are being encouraged to be passive, dependent female parts to men.  It debases women because we are not your ‘sexualized objects’ to gawk at.  We are sending the wrong message that women are supposed to be sexy and virginal, experienced and naïve at the same time.  My last comment to you is that the advertising approach for your clothes line reduces people to de-emphasize human contact and individuality.

M: Aren’t you forgetting that we are the media you’re talking about?  It’s our job to make our clothing products look as purchasable as possible.  If we don’t keep up with all the other fashion companies how could we possibly stay in business?

A:  Products do not need to sexualize women’s bodies in order to sell.  Our models should not be on display as a sexual object.  We are selling this clothing line not women’s body parts.

M:  “Sighs” Clearly we are not getting anywhere with this.  Let’s take a break and get some more opinions on this.  (Move into discussion and pretend everyone is part of the meeting)

Questions:

1. Why would any woman pose in provocative poses for male pleasure?

2. How can we change the way the advertising industry portrays women?

3. Why should the modern man need to see women objectified as objects?

4. How can women make their voices heard in the decisions of advertising?
5. How can the patriarchy definition of beauty coexist with the feminist form of beauty?

Spot the Difference

The Male Gaze and the Oppositional Gaze

In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Berger begins to explain that the story of the male gaze started by the story of Adam and Eve. They both ate the apple and as a result, became aware of each other’s nakedness. From that point on, the separation between woman and man became clear and the illustrations that came after created a narrative of the objectification of women. Women’s bodies are portrayed to be for the male’s view and enjoyment. Upon a quick Google search for the word "women", the following picture was found within the first couple image results: 

http://www.esquire.com/women/ The Sexiest Woman Alive 2016

Does this gaze look familiar to you? Perhaps this picture from Ways of Seeing will ring a bell.

Berger, 55

In the words of Berger, "Is not the expression remarkably similar in each case? It is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man whom she imagines looking at her-although she doesn't know him. She is offering up her femininity as the surveyed" (Berger, 55) Amazing how the expression is so similar and that it didn't even take very long to find a picture like this. Even the name of the article itself where the picture comes from objectifies her beauty into something that can be judged. The declaration of her being the "sexiest" is no different than The Judgement of Paris, where beauty becomes competitive. If you are not declared the sexiest, you are not the sexiest.

"The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly," states Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Not only were the pictures above a good example of that (because the phantasy would be the male having sex with the portrayed female), but there are countless examples in mainstream media as well. One example I'd like to bring up is the female sexualization of working out.

In the video above, which can also be found here, you can easily tell that the video was catered for males. It is a woman working out, so shouldn't the video be showing how a woman works out. All the angles from her cleavage to her butt and just overall shots of her body makes it overly apparent that this is for the male gaze and pleasure. An image like this:

Linda Durbesson / LDFIT

is not only another example of catering towards the male gaze, but is also the result. Because we're so used to seeing things that cater towards the male gaze, we become prone to creating things that do the very same. What does an image of her showcasing her butt and being topless have to do with training and working out? This is an example of the "psychological terrorism" (Hooks, 18) that is introduced in Bell Hooks' The Will to Change. One of the forms of psychological terrorism is the subconscious or even conscious feeling of having to attract and cater towards the male gaze and yet, once we do attract this male gaze, we become wary and fearful of what else can happen. Because we are use to the objectification of women, men feel entitled to our bodies. On the event that we attract the male gaze, we can only be fearful and wary of the possibility of getting harassed or raped. This psychological terrorism extends into the workplace as well, where women are harassed there, or treated unfairly. This video from Buzzfeed illustrates it by switching the roles of men and women: 

It's funny how in the end, after getting a sense of how bad it is, he doesn't realize it's how women feel and gets back to being submersed in a dominant male society. 

With the Oppositional Gaze (term introduced by Bell Hooks), perhaps we can rival the male gaze. Bell Hooks, in The Oppositional Gaze says, " By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." We should challenge the current meta right now. In fact, that Buzzfeed video above is one way we're chipping away at it. There are many videos and articles that contain material like this and it brings awareness to what is going on. The first step is making people aware of what is happening and the next step is coming together to fix it. It's so hard to break society's molds, especially since they're so ingrained. We're trained to associate the color pink with girls and the color blue with boys. We're taught that "boys will be boys" but girls have to watch themselves. I'm not holding my breath for an immediate change but I am looking forward to more content that sheds light on this difference between men and women. 

Works Cited:
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London, 1973. Print. 
Hooks, Bell . In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992, 115-31. Print.
Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Understanding Patriarchy. 17-33. Print.
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.

   

How Women Are Viewed

Women are automatically seen as a sexual object to the man’s eye. A woman’s intelligence is not valued as much as it should be; her body is what draws attention, she is solely defined by a man’s desires. Male gaze is the forceful act of a man looking at a woman of interest. It is that particular awareness that some women dislike and find this approach offensive and rather uncomfortable. The male gaze is the way in which women are projected in society or are being perceived in the real world.

“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at eh cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually”

On page 55 of Berger’s “Way of seeing” compares two images that have similar face expressions. The right image is a photograph from a magazine and the left image is a well-known painting by Ingres. Both women are posing in these images with the knowledge that they are being watched. The facial expression shows that both are alerted and neither of them are smiling.

“She 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 the success of her life. Her own sense of being herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.” (Berger,47).

The surveyed female

A woman has limitations as to how she wants to present herself to the world. She cannot completely be herself for she is being watched, people will be critical and judge her every move. To be adored by others, she must follow the confinements of societal expectations and traditional values while men have more of a freewill when it comes to being who they want to be.

Berger explains the interaction of a man to a woman saying “men act, women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object-and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

Women experience so much stress and anxiety to live up to these “ideals” of what it means to be a woman. Women in society are challenged to reveal their best selves in hopes of receiving recognition, support and respect. Men are seen as domineering human beings, men hold the power; they are the bread winners. Women are considered the opposite; women are degraded by this idea that they are a sign of weakness. This is where Bell Hooks literature comes to focus, helping her readers understand the patriarchal structure and how it has negatively impacted how women are treated and viewed.

Work Cited

Berger, John. "Ways of seeing." The feminism and visual culture reader 38 (2003).

Hooks, Bell. "Understanding patriarchy." Louisville Anarchist Federation. Louisville Lending Library (2013).

Is this Male Gaze & Oppositional gaze?

             I understand the gaze as something natural.  I say we are all allowed to look at one another for a long time if it peaks their interest.  Men may stare at women more than women may stare at men.  Women may also stare at other women more than they stare at men.  Could it be that there is more to looking at women than looking at men?  Women do have variety of clothing and variety of beauty products.  Men do not usually have the variety.  They are dull to look at, most of the time.  There will always be exceptions to the rule like Matthew McConaughey, Bradley Cooper, Leonardo DiCaprio, Channing Tatum, Taylor Lautner, and Conan O’Brien.  They just have the “it” factor.  If I see these people in real life, I would be mesmerized and would likely stare.  Women in general have the “it” factor.  Women are interesting to look at, like Conan O’Brien.  It is no wonder that the word beautiful is usually associated with women.  
             It is often difficult to avoid gazing and staring at beautiful women because there are so many women in the world.  A wise man once said that women are exposed to media that is sending wrong kind of message.  The media would mostly report crimes like assault of a woman by a man, murder of a woman by a man, and rape of a woman by a man.  Parents would teach their daughters to stay away from strangers, ignore approaches and protect themselves from men.  I like to believe that people are essentially good but there may exceptions.  The fear caused by the media would make women avoid all men even if the percentage of men committing those types of crimes are less than 2% and even less from strangers. Some good men like to be seen and like to talk to women.  These kinds of guys would try talking to those beautiful women but with no success since women see most men as predators and try to avoid them.  Guys would try to start a conversion again and again with no luck which would cause them to be more aggressive.  These acts would reinforce the women’s beliefs about men from one encounter with an aggressive act.  Women seem unapproachable nowadays so it does not seem absurd that the male gaze exist. 
              When the gaze is gendered, it becomes something else.  It is not just curiosity or fascination, the “male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly […] displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness”(Mulvey 837).  To put it in perspective, the male gaze appears when a male influenced by culture, usually a capitalist patriarchy, look at a female as something they desire instead of the other aspects of this person.  People would think that the female is some sort of an image or an object which could be owned.  Berger would say that the nude painting of Nell Gwynne is "not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it is a sign of her submission to the owner's feelings or demands. (The owner of both woman and painting.) [...] demonstrated this submission and his guests envied him" (Berger 52).  It seems like that the painting from centuries ago is a reflection of the contemporary perspective of women.

From Newsblog.drexel.edu

             As I walk around the city, I see that the distance between the male and the female might mystify females.  Women in public would be subject to men’s imagination.  They could be seen as images or objects since they are so distant and other worldly like the stars in the night sky.  I believe that because of this distance, women “are depicted in a quite different way from men—not because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (Berger 64).  In a modern patriarchal society, the male gaze can be a pervasive vision which could ultimately control the images that women aspire to.  Media is powerful enough to change reality much like the oppositional gaze.                                                      

The oppositional gaze is when"one learns to look a certain way in order to resist" (Hooks 116).  Some type of women is not seen in popular culture and they are more likely to gain the oppositional gaze because they had to identify themselves.  The oppositional gaze is when black women are “not be hurt by the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating representation, I interrogated the work, cultivated a way to look past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language” (Hooks 122).  The oppositional gaze was developed because the cinema, a popular culture, is not targeted at black women so black women had to find a way to see from an critical perspective that may take different forms such as recognizing racial status or political status.  Examples of movies that shows status are "the help" and "straight outta Compton"

 This is something I have come across watching Netflix. YouTube short version.  It is a song about girls defining themselves.  The episode showed some guys rating girls from 1 to 10.  The girls protest by wearing the same things but they were not united.  This song united the girls to feel good about who they are and inspired a guy to wear capes outside.

This is a nude painting of a man which I thought was relevant since I believe nude paintings are from lack of stylish clothing.  The Artist could just be poor.  From TV show, How I Met Your Mother.  Great Show!

 Work Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing.Penguin. 1972.

 Hooks, Bell, Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. 1992.

Mulvey, Laura. Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohnen. New York: Oxford UP. 1999

US Women in the World.

“… A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste… Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.” (Berger p.46) The appearance of the female has long been expressed as most important throughout history. To be beautiful or to be wanted by men has long symbolized female power. And because so many women instinctively play this role of desirability today, it is as though they do not even notice that there is role to be played. For the role of a female has been created over such a long period of time that it has become a natural part of society.

So much of the media today contributes to the role of the female and the role of the male. As we look at pop-stars and famous people throughout the media, it is easy to see just how accepted these images have become to the public.  To be on TV or in a magazine or movie someone must be, in a word, “beautiful” to the people who will hire them. This is why we see so many famous people (typically female) endure countless plastic surgeries to stay within the image (the “image” meaning being sexually attractive to those watching them, most of whom are men) and in turn feeding the image to the public. This depiction of women in the media can be discussed as the male gaze, a term created by Laura Mulvey. The male gaze can be defined as how the media interprets women. The male gaze is used to describe cinema but can also be applied to everyday life because the media has the power to influence the daily lives of the public. Mulvey describes the male gaze as, “Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself.” If we look at the media today the objectification of women is still extremely recognizable, not only in movies and television but even going far as sexualizing women’s sports team. Like this ad featuring the American water polo team on the ESPN front cover.

 (American water polo team poses for espn)

The objectifying of women is not an idea created by feminists but a true reality in this patriarchal society.  Bell hooks best explains this as,” Patriarchy is a political-social system that 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 dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence”. (hooks p.18)

The male gaze in the media has been created by the patriarchal society we have all been taught and grown up in. The idea of men as solely powerful and women as the objects of men’s pleasure is a huge issue that the media plays into teaching our society.

Growing up I used to idolize strong male characters in action movies. I didn’t want to be their object of affection I wanted to be them. As a female I was taught that I was supposed to like certain things and dislike like other things just because of my sexuality. And unware I had rebelled against this notion and became a “tomboy” as I used to be called. I used to say I wanted to be a man, even though I am not a lesbian because as a child unknowingly, I knew through tv, books, and at home that men had power and women were somehow inferior. Now that I am older I love being a female, I want to be a female, but not an inferior human being. I think of Bell Hooks Idea of the oppositional gaze.

Bell hooks example of the oppositional gaze is, “Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically assess the cinemas construction of white womanhood as an object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either victim or the perpetrator”. (hooks p.122) Because most women depicted on screen were white women, black women like Bell Hooks did not have to identify themselves as either the white woman or white man, because they were not represented on screen. Instead they could deconstruct white supremacy. I see this as an interesting concept. It a sense of power through looking but also a sense of liberation in knowing what is really being depicted in film. If white males and females had the ability to not associate oneself with a character on the screen or associate themselves with the opposite gender, then perhaps the male gaze and hence the patriarchal hierarchy could be challenged to a further extent to change the way women are depicted in the media. I unfortunately feel as though there has not been much progress in this.

I feel like some people feel like progression is high, perhaps because women are seen in the media but I feel like the way women are depicted has only gotten worse. The clothing, the amount of makeup advertised, the painful stripping of ones bodily and natural hairs, the ideas that women who are skinnier are prettier, and countless of other things makes it hard for me to see any progress in societies male gaze.  Especially because most women still contribute to this picture.

Berger, John (1973). Ways of Seeing. London. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin

Hooks, Bell (2004). New York. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.

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

Mulvey, Laura (1999). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. New York: Oxford Journals.

Challenge the challenger

"Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation."(pg17) This is Bell Hook's first sentence in Understanding Patriarchy, just repeat this sentence in your head a few times and tell me, what does it sound awfully a lot like? Take away the word patriarchy, social disease and male body from the sentence and try thinking again.

Done? Good. Now I know you can't actually tell me and that's alright, this whole post you are reading is rhetorical anyways, a straw man argument if you will. I can think of a few things I can spit out right now. Anti-Communism during the Cold war as well as describing Terrorism in the early 2000's. This quote by Bell Hooks is honestly some of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. It is fear mongering, pure and simple, creating an Us Vs. Them scenario. Nothing in between you have to be in the right or you're always wrong. Speaking of this reminds me of a quote I heard while playing Mass Effect 2 (2010) by a character named Garrus Vakarian "It's so much easier to see the world in black and white. Grey...I don't know what to do with grey." Bell Hooks wants us to see this perfect enemy that literally does not exist. Can you tell me who the patriarchy is made up of? The government? Well our president is black and a feminist, we have may senators and representatives that are from all different races and both male and female. So tell me, where are all these white men at that secretly control our world? I can actually answer this too, it sounds an awful damn like this thing called the Illuminati. The enemy Bell Hooks is talking about is literally a conspiracy theory, sounds a bit far fetched, but if you actually stop to think, she really does sound a wee bit bonkers.

Confirming Intensifies

But Allen you're just being angsty and you're wrong. Well shit, maybe I am wrong but I left my angst phase like everyone else in my teenage years. And before that? Funny enough living in a house of mostly guys I was an emotional bitch, I cried a lot at school more times that I wish to remember and suddenly as I entered puberty, I stopped. You want to know why I no longer cry? Let me tell you, it damn well wasn't because "patriarchy". No one told me guys couldn't cry, it was at the time when my brother decided he was going to join the Marine Corps. At first I was confused why he didn't want to go to college like my parents wanted to, but then after a few months of hearing him argue with my parents over and over about his decision it sunk into my head that he could be deployed across the globe and die. So why the fuck was I crying over small shit now? "Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male."(pg 27) Well, if it is so impossible for men to access their full range of emotions then why the hell could I "rebel" against the "patriarchy" and access my full range of emotions? Why is that my friends and I can all cry in front of each other when we're going through a bad time? 

Honestly I had no feelings reading through The Oppositional Gaze, I'm an Asian male so when you have an issue between black and white peoples I have no care in the world who wins or loses. In less than 20 years, China will become a dominant world power that equals the United States politically, economically and militarily. After all, the only way to win is not to play the game.

"You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally.."(pg 51) "To be named is to be oneself. To be nuked is to seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself....... on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body."(pg54) from Berger's Way of Seeing, he loves to play the pronoun game. To never specify exactly who he's talking about. Yes he clearly states male and female, but who are the man and woman? Every single man? Every single woman? Why is it that I must see a woman as an object of my desire? When I look around on the train, I don't care whether a woman is beautiful or not, my thoughts are what do they see me as? In this thought, I reverse completely what Berger is saying. A man does not just look at a woman for his desires, but he too looks back at himself from her point of view.


The readings we have read focus on women and their relationship to men, but where is the talk of race in all of these? Bell Hooks limits herself to her own point of view as a black woman, John Berger is stunted because he is a man himself and talks solely on gender. These authors don't realize it, but they speak from a western mouth. A mouth shaped by the very "patriarchy" they claim to fight against, but they do not look outwards to the rest of the world. Limited are their thoughts and views, the arguments they present to us fall apart in the eyes of those who do not apply to their dialogue just as The Oppositional Gaze did nothing for me, I could take nothing away from it as neither my race nor my gender could line up with her. What then could the two of us match up on? 

Male Gaze and Oppositional Gaze

Caption: How the society has portrayed women. Every detail is that is used to describe us downgrades women. 

John Berger's reading, "Ways of Seeing." mentions that the only reason why the Men and Women began to see each other in the form of man and woman was from the art of awareness. (Berger, 1) Adam and Eve only started to look at each other as man and woman after eating an apple. After Eve realizing that she is in some form of nudity and exposure to Adam, Eve slowly begins to become submissive. Now, we're not sure if this trait existed long before Adam and Eve's story, however, it does become clear that through out history, all women began to posture themselves in the art of impressing the man. 

In Laura Mulvey's essay about "Male Gaze", it simply describes and summarizes the "male gaze" as a way of how men objectifies women. The way women presents themselves to men and whether or not the man finds pleasure in just "gazing" at the woman, stated in her essay "sexual imbalance..[and] pleasure in looking have split between active/male and active/female."(Mulvey, 837) Laura Mulvey coined this term, "the male gaze." However, it was more than evident that this concept is consistent throughout history and through to the present today, whether this concept is in children's favorite cartoon show, or an advertisement, or television. Just like the way John Berger describes it in his "Ways of Seeing", " “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at," women shows themselves in hopes that men will stare at them. 

Caption: These two pictures show the similarities in two different context, similar settings yet the male gaze is apparent.

The image and thought of appearance intrudes our everyday life. A women wakes up everyday and has to go through the train thought of "What should I wear?" or "What should I wear so I appear more beautiful to others?" We are all tied up in the idea of how to look a certain way so we can attract and get the attention of a man. When those thoughts intrudes a person too deeply, it all leads to changing their appearance as a whole, whether it is to get plastic surgery or wearing certain types of clothing that showcases a specific part of the body. However, when a woman does get plastic surgery, everyone criticizes the woman for trying to improve their looks to impress a man, as if that was not the social pressure in the first place. 

Society is dominated by men. All pleasures and understandings revolves around how a woman has to impress a man in every way possible. In Bell Hooks, " Understanding Patriarchy," Hooks defines Patriarchy as a system of "males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially the females, and…through various forms of psychological terrorism” (Hooks, 18) Because of this the male will supposedly have nothing to do with the female's will to appear a certain away to impress the male. What's worse is that, women is wrapped around the fact that we have to always look good a certain way, whether it is that we have to cake on makeup on our faces, or wear short clothing to impress the male, to only get rejected or played with. In films, males are portrayed more as active, controlling objects, while women are passive and their only role was to satisfy the pleasure of men's desires. 

Caption: A representation of how women have to presents themselves, "as perfect" to men. 

John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" states that "

Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.” yet because we tend to try to feed an appetite we often don't feed ourselves to get the desired body image that society has put out and time and time again advocate for women. 

Dying to be Barbie article about anorexia

Caption: Although there are a lot of awareness about anorexia today, many women still use the idea of not eating anything at all to obtain or achieve the media representation of how a women's body should be. 

The oppositional gaze was a response to all the representation of white male's domination in the entertainment industry. What about the oppositional gaze that's so quote-on-quote "rebellious"? Where women, women of color, are forbidden to look at all? In Bell Hooks, "Oppositional Gaze" she states that she "was taught that it was my role to serve, to be weak, to be free from the burden of thinking, to care take and nurture others." while her brother was taught the opposite. Why are women being taught to be submissive at a young age? Hooks, being a woman color, her gaze was controlled by everyone around her - those of white authority and her own parents. However, those that tried to suppress her gaze just made her desire to "gaze," hence the "oppositional gaze." How this relates to the rest of woman, is that if we perform activities that may be unladylike or deviates from the norm of women's actions according to media, it would be looked down upon on. During the era of slavery, the image of black women was shaped by how the white men looked at them. However, according to Hooks, this "oppositional gaze" became an opening for more representation of black women in media.  Hooks states that the ability to be able to look at all is an act of rebellion. There are many white women in the industry, yet not enough of celebrities with color. I, for one, as a women of Asian descent, becomes infuriated when they "asian-fy" a character by changing the shape of their eyes a certain way, and changing the character's looks which is nothing close to how any person of Asian descent can relate to. It is worst when there are specific character traits that are connected to a specific race, yet none of that is true either because a trait can appear in anybody... 

I will never understand what media gives them the right to objectify and asian-fy a race and women with stereotypes that are embedded into all the "diverse" characters in a film or show. Maybe the only show that I have come close to accepting is "Fresh Off The Boat." It shows a lot of the similarities, yet there are still a lot of other representations that are just stereotypes. I see the fact that hollywood is "trying" to keep it's shows more diverse, but even so, the titles of some of these "diverse" shows still mock the race as a whole. Perfect example is "Fresh Off the Boat" and "Black-ish" The only way i would be satisfied is if society and media finally accepts women as women and not objects, races as their own race and that they're also human. Then the later generations, would understand that it is NOT okay to rape, cat-call, snicker comments that may harm a person's identity and life forever. 

Works Cited: 

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London, 1973. Print. 

Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Understanding Patriarchy. 17-33. Print.

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.