The Male Gaze

Kayla Ryals
Art & Women
Professor Cacoilo
2/7/2017

The Male Gaze

The male gaze is the way women in art are presented from a man’s point of view. The male gaze objectifies women and turns them into objects to be seen to pleasure men. John Berger describes a social constraint imposed onto women, he says, “To be born a woman, has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men… 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 crucial important for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.” (Berger 46) Here Berger presents the male gaze. He introduces the male gaze as something that starts the day a woman is born. The male gaze relates to patriarchy in this way, as it begins once a woman is born and it is so subconscious to us that we don’t even know we are participating in it. According to Berger, a woman sees herself as the surveyed and the surveyor, she appears in such a way, as the surveyed, that will please the man that is watching her inside herself, the surveyor. By doing this, the woman turns herself into an object used to please the male eye.
 

In art as well as in popular culture the male gaze is present. In today’s media, movies, music videos, etc. the male gaze is apparent in each of these in many different ways. The male gaze can be seen in hundreds of different movies such as; Friends with Benefits, Mean Girls, Spring Breakers, and Not Another Teen Movie. These movies display women in a way that is pleasing to men. The subjects of the male gaze do not always need to be nude in order to please the eyes of men. Tight clothing, short skirts, and revealing tops are more modern ways for artists and directors to objectify women for their pleasure. In European art, the nude paintings were a clear representation of the male gaze. The women in the paintings were clearly “aware of being seen by a spectator” (Berger 49). Artists painted their pieces in the way they wanted them as the spectator-owner of the women in the paintings.
 

This idea has spread through art and popular culture because of the idea of patriarchy. Patriarchy is “the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.” (Hooks 17) Patriarchy can be described as the structure in which men dominate women. Hooks also says, “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). I don’t use patriarchy in my everyday vocabulary, I didn’t even know what it was until I read what Bell Hooks wrote about understanding patriarchy. When I learned what patriarchy is, I realized that I’ve experienced it many times in my life and I’ve seen it in movies and television shows. The day after we discussed patriarchy in class, I experienced it in my home. I have two dogs, Bella (a girl) and Buster (a boy). My dogs are trained, and they sleep in my room. One morning, Buster decided to wake me up by peeing in his bed. I told my dad and he cleaned up the mess. In my living room we have a cage for the dogs, it is similar to a time out spot for children, but they are free to go in and out of it as they please. But they know when we put them in the cage and lock the door, they are in trouble. So of course, I put Buster in the cage and closed the door in order to discipline him for peeing in the house. When I was going back to my room, my dad told me to put Bella in the cage too. I was confused since Bella hadn’t done anything wrong. I asked him why and he said “just put her in the cage too, they can stay in it together.” This was upsetting to me because I had never actively realized patriarchy in my home until that morning. I didn’t put Bella in the cage because I didn’t feel she deserved to be in it, but when I came back down a couple minutes later, she was stuck in the cage with Buster.