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.
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.
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