Look at her!

Media created the ideal women. It sculpts the image of women into perfection, something that is unrealistic. Something any average teenage girl wants to achieve. The media is what creates the sense of acceptance and rejection. Everyone wants to be accepted by the cultural norm even if that means fitting into the image made by the media. This generated opinions such as the male gaze where women are used as objects to satisfy the male.

In her article, Laura Mulvey coined the male gaze where she illustrates that women are put into film only to fulfill the erotic pleasure of the male audience. Mulvey states that women in cinema are the sole character to make male act a certain way but is not portrayed of any importance. The idea of subject object is where women’s value is only validated by a man. Not only that, women are put under pressure by the media where they are expected to look and act a certain way. They want to look like the girls in magazines and big screen TV.

The image made by the media is what the men want and that’s what the women want to be. Like Berger states, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” In the examples he displayed, he was successful in showing that the European nude paintings used to be a form of art. Now deprived of the art factor, it becomes merely images. The male gaze is a pervasive form of vision in popular culture because it is accepted by the social norm. Women want to look a certain way because they find pleasure in being looked at.

In contrast, the oppositional gaze, proposed by bell hooks, is how women perceive the female image portrayed in media. This idea defines that women can look at females on screen and critique what is being represented. Many times, the female image is blown out of proportion and is not what women are in reality. The oppositional gaze allows them to have the freedom to find the flaws within the media and be able to distinguish the difference between reality and media.

Looking from the authors perspectives, I was able to see where they were coming from. Throughout history, women has been seen as no more than an object of the men when indeed they are much more than that. Women enjoy being looked at because it gives them a sense of confidence and value. I pictured the women I know who are frequent readers of magazines. They look at the pretty women within magazines and envy their style, body shape, facial features and what they believe is beauty. They fail to realize that these females in the pictures have been edited professionally to look unrealistically beautiful and proportional. This also makes me think about the men who determines their ideal type through these professionally edited pictures. They live within a fantasy where they believe that women in magazines can be reality.

After learning these structures, I’ve come to realize how the public looks at women. Although this was proposed years before, it’s still true. Women tries to fit the media female image and what is socially accepted. As a female becoming a media maker, I feel a sense of responsibility to be different from what is expected of me and love myself for being different.