The concept of the male gaze has a long history, and John Berger represents the most evident and obvious examples in the book The Ways of Seeing. He defines the male gaze by stating, “One might simplify this by saying: 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. The surveyor of woman in herself is male” the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – a most particularly an object of vision: sight” (Berger 47).
Unsurprisingly, the idea of the male gaze follows from childhood, since it is so deeply rooted in the history and culture of humanity. One of the most influential sources of learning and entertainment for children is television and cartoons. Disney movies play a big part is almost every child’s life, yet they do not only teach important moral lessons, but also create false and unrealistic expectations for girls and illustrate stereotypes that should not be followed. One of the best examples of that is a movie Sleeping Beauty, where the main character Aurora, supposedly a protagonist, barely says anything throughout the whole movie and is just waiting for the prince to come. She exists there for a prince to look at her while she is innocently and unaware sleeping, while he is staring at her and then kisses. This example shows how woman plays no role while being objectified and used for pleasure even in children’s movie this idea is supported and demonstrated to young people as normal and even magical occurrence. The role of passive role of woman who is submissive to men’s actions and decisions is also illustrated through Hollywood movies as well as described by Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. She writes “at this point scopophilia with taking with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze”(Mulvey). She talks about psychology behind the male gaze specifically illustrated in movies and how that affects the society as a whole, encouraging such behavior in men and passiveness in women.
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| Sleeping Beauty, 1959 |
On the other hand the idea of man being the gazer and the one in power, creating a cycle of patriarchy is shown through Bell Hooks’ writing Understanding Patriarchy. She provides a definition by stating, “Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (Hooks 18). Bell Hooks does not only accurately represent the idea of dominance and abusive relationship between men and women, but also challenges a stereotype that not only women suffer from patriarchy. By her example she emphasizes that there are no winners in the system of patriarchy. Everyone is damaged in the abusive construct, the abuser and the abused one. Our society still remains to be under the rule of patriarchy because it is such a deeply rooted construct. In The Atlantic article named America is Still A Patriarchy, Philip Cohen writes, “the United States, like every society in the world, remains a patriarchy: they are ruled by men. That is not just because every country (except Rwanda) has a majority-male national parliament, and it is despite the handful of countries with women heads of state. It is a systemic characteristic that combines dynamics at the level of the family, the economy, the culture and the political arena” (Cohen). Who stands in power does play a role, but it is closely tied to the deeper concepts of culture and economy that were developing for centuries. And the first step is to acknowledge that patriarchy is very much alive today in order to start breaking down the system of inequality and dominance.
One of the contemporary arguments to attack and strike against the male gaze is a female gaze. It encourages and demands accurate representation of women in the media through a viewpoint of a woman. And the only way to achieve that is by increasing the number of women working in the media field, and bringing that female perspective to change the way female gender has been portrayed and create complex and truthful narratives that will accurately represent women. To accomplish that, the system of patriarchy has to be acknowledged and challenged to allow and support more female directors, producers and actors to enter the media scene. Male gaze, representation and patriarchy are all closely tied and connected together, meaning that in order to break the system, it has to be done collectively with attention spreading to all spheres of life including culture, economy, and politics.
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| Example of male gazing and women representation in the media. |
Works Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation. Print. 1972.
Cohen, Philip. “America Is Still a Patriarchy”. The Atlantic. Nov 19, 2012.
Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Washington Square Press, 2005.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 1975.
ReplyDeleteI knew that the current world is mostly dominated by men with few exceptions, and my knowledge toward the topic, male patriarchy, was limited my experiences and things that I learned at school. By taking this Art and Women course, my perception has gone deeper and developed my sympathy for women lived in the past because women did not have equal rights compared with men in the past. Charlie Siddick reported on her. The term “male gaze” was first coined by film critic, Laura Mulvey in her essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975, where she boldly argued that the “gaze is property of one gender” and that the notion of a “female gaze” exists only as “a mere cross-identification with masculinity”.
https://dateagle.art/blog_post/a-universal-gaze/