Deeper Than Just the Surface

As I was reading Berger's article, Ways of Looking, I felt the same shame that so defined a woman in her nakedness since the Original Sin. I too fell into the trap of that longing desire to be gazed upon by the opposite sex.

As I teenager in high school, I would walk through the hallways hoping to be noticed by him. I purposely starved myself, just to seem as waif-like as those nonchalant models with smokey eyes and breezy hair. I needed to feel that I was just as attractive and desired as them. His look would've given me that validity. His gaze would've meant that I existed in his world.

Berger states, "The prize is to be owned by the judge;" "the eye of the beholder." All I wanted was to have a boyfriend, my first boyfriend. I just wanted the "prize" of this someone to love me. Part of the problem with that, as I think so many young girls suffer from , was my own sense of self worth. I was so blindsided by the drive of wanting to be noticed that I didn't look at myself through my own eyes. I only saw what I was brainwashed to think would get his attention, not my own reflection but a fantasy.

Needless to say that as I get older and wiser, I experience the world from a different perspective now. As I am now my own spectator, I have that power to change perceptions. I understand can apply the phrase, "you can't judge a book by its cover," to what bell hooks states in The Oppositional Gaze, "I want my look to change reality." With that knowledge and power I look deeper than just the surface of whats being told to me is the ideal woman and as a spectator, "I change the system by being a player."

Like bell hooks, she didn't buy into how the filmmakers in Hollywood portrayed to black woman in society, that their roles were subordinate and "devalued." I choose to resist the sensationalism of women and "oppose the dominant order, to develop an oppositional gaze."