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.
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