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