Male Gaze

           The male gaze is how media is shaped into a way a White, American, male may look at something whether it be a movie, commercial, etc.  This concept is very popular in today’s media culture.  We see this very prominent in our news, magazines, websites, and other outlets.   For example if we were to look at any medium, we would she how women and men are portrayed in different ways. The author, Susan Douglas from, “Where the Girls Are”, says “my friends and I were slaves to fashion, and slaves of the mass media...” talking about her experience as a young adult in a world where those things were an important part of life.

            We see that women are portrayed much differently than men and what is apparent is, “according to the prevailing cultural history of our times, the impact of boys was serious, lasting, and authentic” (Douglas 5).  Furthermore, Douglas says “none of our teen girl culture, none of what we did, apparently had any redeeming value at all.” She speaks about how she changed looking back at her earlier life as a young woman and how she realized the shift in the way she thought.  One of those factors ties into women being portrayed as being skinny and unrealistically thin.  She calls them “twig-thin models, and go-go-boot-clad dancers in cages.”  We see that they have no blemishes and their skin is completely flawless, which influences the unconscious part of the mind to believe that things should be this way.  In fact, this view on women is wrong and we know that real women can never be in this hyper-fantasized unrealistic ideology, thus putting an immense strain on normal women and making it that much more difficult for acceptance.  This leads to the question of how women view themselves and how they can avoid the male gaze.

            The oppositional gaze is essentially opposite of the male gaze.  Bell Hooks talks about his in her book, Black Looks: Race and Representation, where she says, “…all attempts to repress our/black peoples’ right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze” (Bell 116).  The significance of how we look at things can impact how we interpret meanings.  Hooks says “there is power in looking,” (Hooks 115) which is why it is very important to understand the concept of the oppositional gaze.   She says, “subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional” (Hooks 116).  This type of “looking” helps us look at things outside of the box and to step away from the conventional ways of seeing things.  Her focus was on African Americans and says, “It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing independent black cinema” (Hooks 117).  She implies that if you step away from how you look at movies there “are moments of ‘rupture’ when the spectator resists ‘complete identification with the film’s discourse’” (Hooks 117).   We can apply the concept of the oppositional gaze to not just films but all other media forms that comply with the “male” gaze.   We have an idea of how these types of looks work but it is also important to note how does this tie into our understanding of what we see in our films and other forms of media.

              Laura Mulvey in her writing, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, speaks about some of the things that may help us understand the “prescribed” role of women.   She says, “the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is two-fold, she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic” (Mulvey 833).  This quote signifies how women have been suppressed over time as far back as you can recount any historical context.  The physical “absence of a penis” is suggested as a negative trait to women and used as a way to denounce power to women.  She further explains, “women then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by symbolic, order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent women still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey 834).  The idea that women are seen as “the bearer” and not the “maker of meaning” is very powerful in how women view themselves and how men perceive women.  This is very true even today where we have a lot of powerful women, they are still stigmatized as not “manly” or for example if she is “manly”, we relate her action to that of a male.  She can never just do an action that is powerful or influential, it is almost always seen from a male perspective.   Another important part of what she says is the fact that men can “live out (his) phantasies…” which restricts women, for example if a man is cheating on his wife he may be seen as a player, or it may be played off as just saying “he is just a guy” but if a woman cheats on her husband she is viewed and punished more harshly by the public by slut-shaming or calling her other derogative names.  She further talks about how women are viewed and the idea behind looking derived from the works of Sigmund Freud, saying “he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 835).  This is how we look at most things unconsciously and how we use our gaze to objectify women on the screen.  Furthermore, she says “…the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of the repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer” (Mulvey 836).   This exemplifies our need to see a fantasy that we cannot obtain from the real world and why we are so in tuned to the images we see in our daily portrayal of women.   Women themselves enjoy seeing the fantasized women who are in no relation to them with their flawlessness, which is something that advertisers are very aware of.  They would rather you not use an oppositional gaze to look at things, rather stick to what they want you to see.

            I never understood the relationship in media images and reality.  I look at these women in advertisement being super skinny and frail.  I am not in the least bit attracted to these models and neither are any of my male friends.  Therefore, it doesn’t make sense that media is portraying women this way, who are they appealing to? Women are used as objects in the big screens and advertisements.  Objectifying women in this way dehumanize them and this leads to a dangerous path.  Women are now viewed as symbols of sexuality rather than human beings.  This is very disturbing because these images are being put on younger and younger girls.  We can always speak with anonymity because we may not know the person, but I think this is a mistake.  How can we make progress? We must change the system it rides on.  We can’t simply tell women to not accept these things and rebel.  That would not be enough.  From my understanding of what I have learned so far, we need to impact the industrial backbone of where the problem really lies.  We need to take a second look and take into consideration the hard work it will take to change the mind of the masses.

            Here are some illustrative examples of our popular culture:



This video is a comparision to give you an idea of how women have been viewed for a long time:

Now compare that to this more current view of models:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wvC40NWVnZs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Obtained from: http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/fashion/ss/Super-Skinny-Fashion-Models_10.htm

           

Image obtained from:

http://www.likecool.com/Sexy_Robot_Women--Pic--Gear.html