A Call to Fight the Male Gaze

       On my way home one night from a party, I was walking past a man in his late 20s who said to me, “Hey pretty girl, come talk to me for a minute.” I sped up my pace and then started to think about why he felt he could engage in a conversation with me. Was it because of what I was wearing? Did seeing a teenage girl in a dress and heels make him think he could speak to me like that? The same type of thing happened a few months after that encounter, when I was walking home from school in a jacket, jeans, and sneakers. As I passed by a man in his 30s he said to me, “Where are you going sweetie?” Now this time I was not dressed as “revealing” as I was the time before, but I still had a similar experience.

Ceres and Cupid by Von Achen (1552-1615)

       Those encounters were nothing short of the term “male gaze” that Laura Mulvey coined in the 1970s in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The male gaze refers to how women are represented in the media as passive objects for heterosexual males. In her essay she states that there is “sexual imbalance….[and] pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey, 837). Although the term male gaze was only coined at the end of the 20th century, this concept can also be seen in European paintings as early as the 16^th century. A common theme in the paintings was naked men looking at a naked woman, though the woman rarely looked back at the men. As mentioned in Berger’s book Ways of Seeing, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47). As he described it, “her body is arranged…to display it to [the men’s] sexuality. It has nothing to do with her sexuality” (55).

This Dolce & Gabbana advertisement is a good example of the male gaze and how the woman is used to show her submission to the men. (Note: this advertisement has received an enormous amount of backlash)

In this Gucci advertisement, notice how the man seems to be in control of the woman's head. Rather than looking at the man, the woman is looking at the "spectator-owner" (Berger, 56).

The male gaze is seen in many different areas of the media such as: the music industry, news coverage of sexual assault victims, politics and much more.

         Each day we are all constantly being projected the idea that women need to look a certain way in order to get the attention of a male. When those individuals choose to change their physical appearance- either by buying tighter clothing or getting plastic surgery done- they get criticized for it. In the media and pop culture today, white heterosexual men make decisions about what sorts of images are published to the masses. The male dominated industry of film, advertisements, and the like is a symptom of the very threatening patriarchy disease. In Understanding Patriarchy, Hooks defines “Patriarchy [as] a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially the females, and…through various forms of psychological terrorism” can maintain their authority (18). It is the reason why women are represented as only concerned with caking on makeup and spending hours on their hair merely to impress a male who will then go on to say that she has no personality.

In music videos, female's passive behavior and objectification are often the foundation. The "Blurred Lines" music video (created by Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell) is a prime example.

       As explained by Bell Hooks, the oppositional gaze developed because of the slaveholder’s “attempts to repress…black people’s right to gaze” which only increased the slaves’ desire to look (116). Bellhooks describes gazing as having power and that it is contradictory for parents to tell their children not to stare but at the same time scold the child to “look at me when I talk to you” when they are punished (115). The oppositional gaze developed as more African-Americans began to watch film, knowing that they were allowed to look and there would be no punishment. Hooks indicated that the oppositional gaze was a gateway to “developing independent black cinema” since there was a lack of black representation in the media (117). This social movement that African-Americans developed, reminds me of the We Are #WomenNotObjects campaign that brings awareness to how women are seen as objects in different forms of media
       If our society became more aware of the male gaze and how it expresses to the public that it is perfectly fine for men to cat-call, rape, abuse, and over-sexualize women, then possibly more people would speak out against how women are portrayed and push for a change. As a female who is very aware of the over –sexualization of women on all media platforms, I must be more critical of how females are depicted in movies (since most fail the Bechdel Test). It is the responsibility of my generation to change what is seen in the media because the younger generation of children are already aware of what is being projected to the public and are not comfortable with it

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Print 36-64.

Hooks, Bell. “Chapter 7: The Oppositional Gaze.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston. South End Press, 1992. Pp 115-131

Hooks, Bell. “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.” New York: Atria, 2004. 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