In her article Visual Pleasure and
Male Cinema, Laura Mulvey discusses the "sexual imbalance"
within the film industry and describes it in four words: active/male, passive/female. Women
are the exhibhits, they are the objects to be gazed upon by the
heterosexual male, this is the male gaze. Mulvey stresses that the male
gaze is so prevalent in our society because all of Hollywood is
male. As a woman, this theory of a male gaze certainly has some very
valid ideas. Even before television and film, women make up the majority of the
nude paintings and photographs, hungry for their male onlooker.
Here we are thousands of years after this first began and we are still seeing
the same thing. If you don't believe me, look at almost any Tom Ford ad. The difference between then and now is that it has crept into so many more areas of
our lives because of modern day technology. Whether your on your smart phone or staring at the ads on a subway, the message is there.
As you really think about this
concept of "gazing," you begin to realize how powerful it is to look at other people
and what we, the person looking,
gets from it. Bell Hooks really
highlights this idea. She
paints an excellent picture of the power in "looking." at the time of
slavery. Black men were punished for even looking at a white woman. This idea
that because they were black, they had no right to gaze upon a white woman.
Gazing was something only for the white man thus created the
oppositional gaze. It was a desire to look out of rebellion to the white man. Hooks takes a look at what the "male gaze" becomes within the oppositional gaze and the stereotypes of black men have become. She really challenges the authority of the "spectator." She encourages black women to not believe the stereotypes of black men, but to take a critical look at them.
Whether we like to admit it or not, media is extremely powerful and highly suggestive. It takes a toll on its public in so many different ways. Introspectively media has surely manipulated my ideas and lack thereof. There have been countless times where I see an ad and think, "wow, wish I looked like that." These constant images of thin, naked women constantly thrown in our faces, it has shaped our ideas of what we should be and how we should look. We have become more self aware in a self concious way and it's not necessarily a good thing. I think John Berger had an excellent point when he said "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object and most importantly an object of vision: a sight." We walk down a street and if we pass our reflection in the window, we watch ourselves. We watch how people notice us when we walk into a room and we allow their reactions to determine how we see ourselves.
It's sad to realize that whether it's a male gaze or the oppositional gaze, we have given "looking" its power. We as a human race buy into what the media feeds us. We allow it to shape so much of how we see ourselves, how we see other people and how we respond to what we see. Jim Morrison once said, "Whoever controls the media, controls the mind."
Berger, John. Chapters 2,3. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1972.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. NY: Oxford UP, 1999
Bell Hooks. “The Oppositional Gaze.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
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