"This is a man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl"

The male gaze is the lens through which the world is viewed. This gaze gives men the opportunity to create representations, through film, paintings and media, of how they think women should be. Many of these images portray women as weak, available and submissive, giving men the feeling of being powerful and in control. In The Nude Portrait of  Eva, a young women can be seen laying on a bed, with her eyes closed and her legs wide open. It looks like she is on display and readily available for any man that comes her way. This image was created with the male spectator in mind. 

"Men act and women appear. 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." (Berger) The male gaze effects everything a  woman does, from the way she talks, down to the way that she walks. She always has the male spectator in mind, therefore she is trying to live up to his standards.  

Miss America was a beauty pageant that began as a marketing ploy in the 1920's. It was originally called The Bathing beauty Contest. An Atlantic City hotel owner decided that having a contest that judged women and awarded the winner with a $100 was a good way to pick up business. The contest was two days long and women were displayed in bathing suits and evening wear. (Thompson) These pageants were objectifying women, because they weren't being judged based on how smart they were or how good of a person they were. They were being judged on their looks, but mostly because of the way her body looked in these two outfits. 

The male gaze is something that continues to affect women and media today. Many male rappers and singers have music videos that have half naked women parading around. Rapper Nelly’s song Tip Drill has lyrics that read, “It must be your ass because it ain’t your face, I need a tip drill”. The message that he is sending in this song is that some women are only desired for their bodies because their faces are not pretty enough. As he is saying these lyrics in his video there are a bunch of women dancing around shaking their butts in the background. At the end of the video Nelly proceeds to swipe a credit card down one of the females butts. The women participating in this video are sending a message that lets viewers know it's okay if you don't acknowledge them for their inner beauty. 
This summer my sister and I were returning to our seats, at MetLife Stadium, after buying drinks. Two men approached me. One started by saying "your so damn sexy ma. Can I give you my number?" I replied by telling him "no I'm not interested." His friend then said to me "don't try to act like your too good for me. Don't worry baby I can afford you." The fact that he had the audacity to speak to me as if I weren’t a person made me furious. I yelled back at him "as if I were an object that can be bought. I am a person with feelings not an item you can just throw a little cash at and buy." I guess he wasn’t expecting me to respond the way I did because he then apologized and tried to take back and rephrase what he had just said. The fact that he said it at all is just another example of how women continue to be objectified even today.

bell hooks takes the idea of the male gaze a step further and says that not only should the idea of gender be taken into consideration but the idea of race as well. Many black films that were created were done so for male spectators. In "The Oppositional Gaze" bell hooks says that "black male filmmakers represented black women in their films as objects of male gaze." Black women have the ability to look at films and image with a critical eye because of inability to relate with the characters being shown. Being a black woman, there are many times that I watch movies and feel like an outsider. Instead of putting myself in the shoes of the characters I watch and make note of why I disagree with certain scenarios. Having the ability to see what is going on outside of the immediate context of a film allows me to see the hidden messages.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972. Print.

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

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. NY: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-844
Thompson, Sue Ellen. "The History of The Miss American Beauty Pageant.". Omnigraphics, Inc.,n.d. Web. http://brownielocks.com/americapageant.html.