What does she see when she looks in that mirror?

She walks into the bathroom, climbs onto the toilet and opens the medicine cabinet to look at herself in the mirror.  This FIVE year old girl is already thinking about the way she looks, applying make-up and asking if she looks pretty.  "A woman must continually watch herself.  She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself" Berger says in his book Ways Of Seeing (Berger. 46). Media's impact of the male gaze is so strong even in a five year old innocent little girl who does not truly interact with media as we might.  The only form of media she utilizes is PBS-kids and the music her parents listen to in the car.  However, somehow someway she managed to fall victim to this gaze.  Looking in a mirror, asking if she looks pretty, applying make-up to hope that she appears to be as pretty as so and so.  Even if media is not absorbed by someone directly, it is absorbed by peers which convey the message.  "There is power in looking." (hooks. 115)

The male gaze is pervasive in that it is objectifying us.  We are not humans, not equals we don't play on the same field.  Images of women on magazines are airbrushed to look like what men wish truly existed and they could have.  Women in video games do not even remotely look like the average women, they are portrayed in a sexist light as well because this helps sell the games as well.  With that in mind when men look at the average woman it is always at a specific body part.  It makes us self conscious in a way that we start to think, are we pretty enough to be looked at or are they internally laughing at us.  Women suffer from immense pressure to look a certain way, ways in which most often our bodies could not possibly handle.  We are told big boobs attract men and so women get implants.  Now all the rage is buttocks and so women get butt implants or pads.  When do we as a human being see ourselves as that and not as a woman that needs to look a certain way.  When does it matter what we have to say or how we act and not what we look like?

This is where the oppositional gaze might be a way we take back our power.  bell hooks speaks about the oppositional gaze as a way in which black slaves rebelled against their white masters or even their parents.  It was the way they were able to rebel and sometimes escape their life on a plantation.  However, her statements such as the one that says the oppositional gaze is a way in which we can assert that we too can look but also that we hope that our look can one day change reality (hooks 116).  Though her piece speaks mainly to the black woman I believe that for feminism to continue to prosper we must not separate the races.  I do believe that it is important criteria that we use to distinguish individuality and culture but women are women are women and I believe we all want the same reality.  I don't wish to criticize her work but her piece spoke to me in such a way that it was saying that white women wanted to be the nude, they wanted to be gazed at when we do not truly know this.  Were white women abused by the gaze? yes.  Were black men given a reprieve through art to have a gaze? yes.  Did they continue to produce art in a way the white artist did, thus exploiting black women as an object and not a person? yes.  And so were black women abused? yes.  We need to be UNITED.   In the image above can you see how the black woman looks to the white woman as if she is saying "bitch look what you started, now I am being objectified because you couldn't stand up for yourself"


Women must stand up and become spectators.  We must have a voice, we must be able to speak to society and tell them who we really are, that we are not an object.  Black women and men as well need to stand up and be able to tell society who they really are.  Media outlets like the movies and advertising portray women as object and black men and women in such a negative light that does not even relate to the general public at large.  We need to take our lives into our own hands, take our lives back.  One way would be to stay away from the Hollywood movies that show us in a negative light.  Another way would be to produce media that shows us in a positive more true to life light.

Thought I can openly admit, maybe I shouldn't, that I am not an open feminist.  I have been raised to work for everything i want.  Never use my body or womanhood to get ahead.  However, from this class I have seen that it is because the radicals that define feminism in a negative light that caused me as well as other women to not want to associate it.  These women that created such a bad repertoire is possibly the reason why we are still objectified.  Black men and women continue to even portray themselves in the Hollywood way to make money and so it continues to keep the truth from being something that we see as reality.  They say the truth will set you free, we need to set ourselves free.  I can say that thought I probably will not stop indulging in some movies that will continue to will objectify me I am more open to watching movies that give me a voice, humanize me!


Sources:
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


Kim Kardashian image
super heroes posed as women
Lara Croft
black and white women