Looking

            We like heroines. We like them in action films, dressed head-to-toe in spandex, with sleek hair and prepped faces. Preferably holding a rifle, portraying an atypical, badass, black-belt female, only she must stand a bit behind the male protagonist, the real hero, the one who’s risking it all to save the world and get the girl. We watch these films and, whether we are male or female, we moviegoers identify with the male protagonist, the real fighter, the evolving character that the story is all about (Mulvey). Regardless of how many bad guys the heroine shoots in her spandex glory, and regardless of how much we get to watch her run, and see her look at the true protagonist with her wanting, beautiful eyes, we only turn to the heroine, the secondary character, for her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey).

The heroine of In Time doesn't know any better than to shoot at people unnecessarily after the male protagonist shows her how to use a gun.

            Where does this leave the females in the audience? With whom are we supposed to identify throughout such dazzling, original films? Producers make sure that we can all identify with the male, because the male gaze sells. They help us do so by directing the camera just this way and that, so that we’re sure to understand the male’s point of view, and so that, by the end of the film, “what counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather represents… [because] in herself, the woman has not the slightest importance” (Mulvey). And so we all, as one society, take on the role of the male whilst enjoying a cinematic production, or reading a magazine, or watching women parade themselves down the street (because, clearly, one cannot question that they walk along avenues mainly to show off their bodies, to be judged by men and women alike, to be grinned at, or scoffed at, or catcalled). And while men grow up learning that this is how they must analyze a woman in all situations, including, say, when former First Ladies attempt to become president (their pantsuits must be critiqued! ignore their politics!), women learn to do the same to each other, and, naturally, to themselves. Men watch women. “Women watch themselves being looked at” (Berger). This is the male gaze.

            More specifically, it is often the white, male gaze. Historically, black women have not only had to identify with a foreign gender, but also a foreign race. It has been a step up from slavery, during which they “were denied their right to gaze [entirely], a strategy of domination,” as they can now look defiantly at white characters, but it has also forced them to choose between giving up their right to look and “engaging in [media’s] negation of black representation” (Hooks). Even contemporary black, male independent filmmakers are representing black women as objects of the male gaze, regrettably using such representations to inject “violence [in]to the image” of a black woman. “Responding to this assault, many black women spectators…[have] looked the other way” (Hooks). It is this representation (which can be found in most compelling black cinematic productions, such as Precious, the story of an abused, overweight African American teenager and her inability to access education) that brings forth many contemporary disparities between blacks and whites, such as the lack of media coverage of violence against black women; it is to be expected, and therefore much less newsworthy than Kim Kardashian’s wedding. These realities can be countered with the oppositional gaze, the opposite of the white, male gaze, via independently produced black media. Why are we allowing white, male filmmakers to represent female blackness? How much has our society really evolved since the days of Amos ‘n’ Andy?

            These two opposing structures, the male gaze and the oppositional gaze, put women in an odd place, torn between two radically different ideals: the flawless sex object and the independent, confident woman. Adolescence becomes a “cultural schizophrenia,” in which we strive to please our spectators, participate in consumerism of products that promise to make us more worthwhile of the gaze, and conform to patriarchy’s expectations of female submissiveness, but also strive to express our independence, to say that we don’t care what people will think on the street (Douglas). Women cannot escape. They attempt to fight back, to make advertisements in which girls “treat men like sex objects,” or glorify becoming “the first woman who refused to take [a man’s] phone calls.” Yet, “why should any of us, male or female, be interested in someone who won’t take our phone calls, who either cares so little for us or is so manipulative?” Why do we “act as if it were a good thing to be rude and inconsiderate?” (Kilbourne). Why do we strive to “have balls”?

RationalSkepticism.org

This is no more what it means to be an independent woman than is the heroine dressed in spandex. It is simply another barrier against equality. In fact, it is worse, because it is a barrier dominantly built by other women. How can we fight this looking war if we won’t even stand up for our own side, and instead try to live up to standards created for males by males? Why do we tell boys to leave the cleaning to us after a party, because they aren’t “as good at it as we are” and “they’ll just mess it up”? Why do we call each other sluts, and silently smirk at each other’s outfits on the street? Why do we judge each other so harshly? Because we can’t become that ideal heroine, no matter how much money we spend at Sephora. We are not the enemy. The male gaze is the enemy. Because the male gaze sells.

References

Berger, John. "Ways Of Seeing Chapters 2&3." Ways Of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting  Corporation, 1972. 36-63.

Douglas, Susan. “Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.” Three Rivers Press, 1995. 3-20. 

Hooks, bell. "The Oppositional Gaze." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 115-31.

Kilbourne, Jean. "The More You Subtract The More You Add Cutting Girls Down To Size." Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. Touchstone, 1999. 128-54.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. NY: Oxford UP, 1999. 833-844.