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).