John Berger’s Ways of Seeing discusses a concept
called the Male Gaze. This is explained
to be the way a man views a woman. He
uses examples in art and also in everyday life.
The Male Gaze is an exchange of power between the surveyor who is man and
the surveyed who is woman. With this,
women are forced to be aware of themselves in ways that men are not. This unbalance of power relates to the
concept of patriarchy. Bell Hooks describes
patriarchy as “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently
dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females”
(Hooks 18).
With this
unbalance of power we can understand how men and women go through their lives
very differently. Berger explains; “A
woman must continually watch herself. She
is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is
walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she
can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping” (Berger 46). This concept really struck me upon reading
it.
The Male Gaze is
something that takes place in women’s lives whether they realize it or
not. It is all around us and it shapes
the decisions we make about ourselves.
I, myself, unfortunately have realized how prominent it is in my life. As a feminist and woman who wants to be able
to not rely on the approval of men, it seems that I cannot avoid it. It is something that is learned from a young
age and develops especially in early teenage years when girls start becoming
targets to advertisements of beauty products.
As a person who spends
hundreds of dollars in Sephora, I now sit here and question why I do this. A part of me wants to say I do this for
myself but when you understand the role of patriarchy and the Male Gaze in the
media you can see that there is something deeper than just that. The media does not prey on men in the same
way it does to women. With women being
so aware of the way they’re perceived to others, the media knows how to take
advantage of this.
Women are
constantly bombarded with thousands of advertisements a day telling us how to
be beautiful. The word “beautiful” is so
ambiguous and yet millions of women are on a never ending mission to achieve
it. This is because the Male Gaze puts
so much pressure on our lives. In a
world where you are so incredibly conscious of your appearance and your
presence, how could there not be pressure?
Another example of
patriarchy and the Male Gaze in advertisement is in Victoria’s Secret ads. The thing about these ads is that they are
for women, but not exactly for women.
Everything about them leads back to men.
Not only do men enjoy looking at them, but also women know men enjoy
looking at them. This leads to women
buying the product because they want to look like these women in the
advertisements who are appealing to men.
Unfortunately,
because of patriarchy many women have come to feel like the Male Gaze is what
deems them as beautiful. It has become
embedded into our culture that the male approval is what shapes a woman’s
worth. This is a very harmful idea. Berger explains; “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 47).
Related to this,
we can look into “cat calling” on the street.
Cat calling is a term used for street harassment, most often from a man
to a women. For many women cat calling
is a terrifying experience. It allows a
man to exert his dominance over a woman and publicly humiliate her with his words. What makes cat calling so horrific is that
the cat caller knows he’s not going to get a date with the woman he’s
harassing. He doesn’t do it for
that. He does it to assert his dominance
over the woman. To get a better
understanding of this you can read some examples of the horrible experiences of
cat calling on this interesting blog, http://catcalled.org/.
However, for some
women cat calling gives a feeling of reassurance. It makes them feel as though the efforts that
they put in are working. They can feel as
though the products that were advertised to them were worth the money and
effort. They feel validated and worth something. This is a huge problem and it’s fueled by
patriarchy. It has developed from the
imbalance of power between men and women.
It allows the media and advertising agents to take advantage of women’s
desire to be desirable.
-Savannah David
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