Gabrielle Veintimilla
Professor Caçoilo
Introduction to Art and Women
11 February 2020
Male Gaze and the Patriarchy: Conforming Women to Constraints as a Sex Object
The role of women has evolved throughout history – they have been powerful matriarchs and led nations as queens. They have played pivotal roles in many of the most critical moments throughout time. While they have been in such positions of power, women spent much of their history being restricted in comparison to their male counterparts. These restrictions have led to women being portrayed as sexual objects, created in the image best suited to please the heterosexual male. This perspective has created a lens of viewing women as sights, rather than actual living beings, which is frequently referred to as the male gaze. Many have studied and dissected the essential role the male gaze has played on manipulating women as objects meant to please the male viewer and his desires, including the likes of the art critic, John Berger. The male gaze has enabled the patriarchy to continue to assert its power in society, particularly in some of the most effective forms of media, including art and popular culture. The male gaze and the patriarchy continue to facilitate in the process of keeping women in submissive roles concerning the heterosexual male.
The male gaze has generally been seen as the depiction of women and the world from the perspective of the heterosexual male, which puts women typically in constraints as a sexual object meant to fulfill the desires of this particular viewer. Acclaimed art critic, John Berger, analyzed the male gaze in Ways of Seeing. Berger confirms that these chains women have been put in to have them bound from birth: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space into the keeping of men” (Berger, 46). According to Berger, the way the patriarchal society that we find ourselves in has put women in a subservient role from the minute a gender is assigned to them, before they even leave the womb. One of his best examples of simplifying the male gaze in Ways of Seeing is as follows: “And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of critical importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life” (Berger, 46). As a woman progresses through late, everything she does is in respect to the feelings of her male counterpart – asking herself if her looks or her behavior are acceptable enough for the male viewer in her life. Berger continues to analyze the way women carry themselves in the paragraphs that follow: “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 women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger, 47). Ways of Seeing includes various visual examples of this surveyed/surveyor complex women have had to combat throughout time and the men who have enabled it throughout much of history – women being watched with perverse looks from men, who are enjoying the sight before them; women looking at the (insinuated/assumed) “male” viewer with a particular look meant to please that specific audience; marketing that is directed towards women and the fixation of their superficiality, which comes from the constant power struggle against men, and so forth. The male gaze has become so prevalent in art and popular culture because of its long history being enabled by both men and women, to the extent where it almost becomes easy to disregard because it has become the new normal.
Susanna and the Elders, Tintoretto, 1555-1556, Oil on Canvas
Susanna and the Elders, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610, Oil on Canvas
I included these two versions of Susanna and the Elders, painted by an acclaimed male and female artist, to present how perspective is deeply entrenched in who the media or artist perceives their audience to be. While the story remains the same, as it is Susanna being spied on and her privacy is being invaded by males as she bathes, the presentation of the story is drastically different. In Tintoretto’s painting, Susanna is to blame for allowing herself to be spied on as her vanity (her looking at the mirror) is her ultimate downfall. In Gentileschi’s version of the same story, Susanna is genuinely uncomfortable by these men that are watching her, and the men come with an ominous presence as they are painted more darkly with more menacing shading and shadows.
The existence of the patriarchy has been found throughout history and easily enabled by men and women alike. Bell hooks describes the patriarchy as “the single most-life threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation… Men who have heard and know the word [patriarchy] usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences” (bell hooks, 17). Within this opening paragraph, bell hooks accurately captures what the patriarchy allows men to do and what is refrains women from doing. Men disregard anything involving a woman, as it seemingly has no direct effect on their own lives. They do not realize their actions or enabling of this very social structure is detrimental to themselves and the women in their lives. She also continues later in the chapter with another critical analysis of the patriarchy: “To indoctrinate boys into the rules of the patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings” (bell hooks, 22). I believe this is one of the biggest pitfalls that we as a society, as parents, and so forth have taught our boys. We continue to instill this belief that boys shouldn’t be allowed to be in touch with their feelings, that it is effeminate and, therefore, wrong, for them to show their true feelings. One of my favorite quotes concerning the patriarchy and this particular point comes from Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She creates such a powerful point in We Should All Be Feminists: “We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage” (Adichie, 6). This, for me, has always been an incredibly tragically true notion that we, as a society, have to stop enabling. Changing the way men perceive themselves can gradually change the way they see women.
The female gaze provides a much more in-depth look at the world around them. Characters are less sexualized, and stories are told with a much more realistic and creative hand behind them. This gaze is presented when women fill in the roles that have been long occupied by men (i.e., directors, producers). They often offer more stories in a better, more realistic light in comparison to their male counterparts. Critics of women cinematographers have realized that the stories they present have much more depth than those presented by male cinematographers. Far too many barriers exist, holding female artists back from fulfilling the extent of their talents.
The male gaze and the patriarchy have long been interwoven in our society and history, which has caused me to better understand the analyze the media that I have personally been consuming since I have become better acquainted with these lenses. One particular example I have noticed is the evolution of Harley Quinn, who has long been over-sexualized in the DC universe and at the beck and call of the mental and physical abuse of the Joker. The most evident transition for me for Harley Quinn outside of the comic books and cartoons (which is hypersexualized for something that is meant to be consumed by a younger audience) is her look from Suicide Squad to her new look in her stand-alone film Birds of Prey. In 2016, Margot Robbie brought Harley Quinn to life in Suicide Squad in a bikini bottom and a slashed shirt with “Daddy’s Lil’ Monster” (see attached image) written straight across her chest. This outfit, combined with her schoolgirl pigtails to feed into the male schoolgirl fantasy, is the epitome of the male gaze in popular culture. It becomes much easier to understand why Margot Robbie was dressed in such an outfit when you see that the team that directed, produced, wrote, and did most everything else for the film was an all-male team. Birds of Prey, in contrast, is led by a much more women-driven team – leading to a less overly-sexualized Harley Quinn. I also enjoyed how this film continued to deconstruct the male gaze in other forms (i.e., theatrical posters with Harley Quinn as The Birth of Venus by Botticelli as attached below). I enjoy seeing new forms of media that have been created by women because it feels like a lot more thought is put into the development of it and breaks out of these constraints, as opposed to when men create something that falls into the same basic mold that pleases the heterosexual male. During this assignment, I found an article (linked below) by The Hollywood Reporter, which focuses mainly on how Birds of Prey attempts to deconstruct the long-intertwined male gaze in cinema in particular. The male gaze and being a woman in a society that is trying to turn the tides of history (i.e., #MeToo movement) and having my own personal experiences, I feel like I am growing increasingly aware of the environment around me and I try to not allow any of this behavior that has been enabled by men and women alike for so long.
The Evolution of Harley Quinn (first image – Suicide Squad, 2016; second and third images – theatrical posters for Birds of Prey, 2020)
Works Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. 1973. Print.
hooks, bell. Understanding Patriarchy. Louisville Anarchist Federation, 2010. Print.
Sims, David. “The Value of the ‘Female Gaze’ in Film.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 2 Aug. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/female-gaze-lincoln-center-series-women-cinematographers/566612/.
Wardlow, Ciara. “How ‘Birds of Prey’ Deconstructs the Male Gaze.” The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Feb. 2020, www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/how-birds-prey-deconstructs-male-gaze-1277232.
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