The Male Gaze

Rana Yassa 

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

If you search ‘old portraits’ or ‘ancient paintings’ all what will appear will be nude pictures of mostly women. Through ages, artists and painters loved drawing naked women, as a symbol of beauty and innocence. At least that was the way they were used to, drawing women showing them weak and always available to fulfill the men’s needs. Till now, women are displayed on magazines, film covers, drawings, ads, and many more the media uses women to grab the attention of their customers. The act of displaying woman as objects is referred to as ‘The Male Gaze’.

As shown in the painting, three women looking away from the painting and not also looking directly to the two men staring at them.

John Berger who described The Male Gaze in his book ‘Ways of Seeing’. As Berger explained “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 - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight”.

A person wouldn’t recognize the male gaze until actually hitting the fact that it is a reality. Displaying women all the time on any TV show or movie. Displaying women in posters all the time, showing off their body and claiming their availability through their expressions. Where you find a man on the poster is symbolizing power, confidence, success, strong, and serious in all kinds of ways. The culture is so used to display women that people don’t see it anymore, we don’t realize how models always have to look perfectly attractive in the ‘ideal image’ of a woman. We don’t recognize how actresses have to have the perfect look before any talent for them to be able to succeed. We all see how female actresses transform after being popular and all the time not because they want to but because the media wants them to.Patriarchy is another word that not too many of us used to hear. Many cultures tend to have huge respect for men and much less respect for women. Many think that female’s purpose is to serve men and please them all the time. I hear all the time in the Arab community (considering that I am Egyptian myself) how girl’s who hit their 13^th or maybe younger get married right away to a grown-up man. Teens get forced to get married and live behind their man’s shadow.

This is an ad by Calvin Klein, the ad as you can see shows the dominant which are three men and a women who is weak and only there to please them. Aggressively and by order she has to do what is said to her.

Bell Hooks wrote about Patriarchy in her book ‘Understanding Patriarchy’ and she explains what she has been through all her life as a child in a family whose lifestyle was patriarchy. She explains how her father wanted her in a certain behavior, fragile and sensitive while he wanted her brother to be aggressive and loud.
As explained by Hooks “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”. Men are born to believe by the influence of society that they have the power and control to be anything and everything they want, while on the other hand women are born to have so little or no choices at all. Men are believed in the society to have the skills and abilities to force any women to do what he wants. What hooks describes in the text is still happening today maybe in a less updated parts of the world. 

Facts around us still prove that patriarchy is still alive, when a man decided what a woman should wear. When a man decides whether a woman should work or not, that is still total control. When males still earn more than women and still believe their work and effort worth more. When the media says what a female is capable of and what she is not. When families in many cultures still believe this is the right way to raise girls, to build a fence around them and limit all their moves. I wish I could live in a world, where I am responsible for my own decisions and mistakes. In a world where my family won’t tell me how should I laugh or how should I talk with guys. Where I can decide for myself not waiting for my family to take every single decision for me. In a world where I do what I love freely and express myself the way I feel comfortable in. In a world where I dress the way I want to dress not the way my family thinks it’s ‘appropriate’.  I wish I could be a female, a girl, a lady, and a women who no one would have the right to judge and shape her life.