The Male Gaze

The male gaze is the objectification of women by men as viewers. The male gaze is an expression of the oppressor gazing upon the oppressed: man casts his gaze upon a woman as if he owns her sexuality, which serves to reaffirm his own manhood; his power over something and everything. That something, in terms of his gaze in the world of media, is the female body. Media, and all of its mediums, has evolved in the structure of a patriarchal society. Laura Mulvey, in her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Media," states "Unconscious patriarchal society has structured film forum..." Mulvey suggests that "the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world." A woman's body, her very existence, evokes castration anxiety in men. So, as Mulvey describes, "...the castrated object becomes a fetish for reassurance rather than dangerous..." in terms of how the female body is viewed and used in our phallocentric culture.

This structure, this paradigm - born out of deep fear and multiplying its own pattern of domination over time - is the foundation of contemporary media in pop culture. This systematic and systemic code has created and bred the exploitation and abuse of the image of the female body in the eyes of the audience: men, women and children alike. It duplicates itself like a cancer. Our media culture is born and revolves around the idea of man as viewer, as gazer. Mulvey proposes that even the traditional narrative structure: the hero who is compelled to act for, or as a result of, the image of the conventional beauty (a result of the male gaze) which somehow threatens his manhood in the story: has been formed out of male as dominator/viewer. For instance, Mulvey uses the example of Hitchcock's films "...the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination." Hitchcock's style was not only born out of classic cinematic structure, but has strongly influenced contemporary cinematic structure.

The images of female breasts, legs, buttocks; the images that pervade every aspect of visual media, and thus, our visual world, pervade our culture. These images reinforce the act of men using women as objects of fantasy. The world is the canvass in which man has painted the idea of the perfect woman. This idea has and continues to negate the real beauty of a woman: the right to exist as she is. Instead, she is forced to, as John Berger states in Ways of Seeing "...watch themselves being looked at..." "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." Berger suggests women are not only the viewed, but they are also viewers of themselves. They have a watchful eye on themselves. They are, essentially, in perpetual performance mode for the male spectator, for which they aim to please. We (women) don't mean to be this way. We are living habits, hardwired to do as we are shown.

belle hooks, in her essay, The Oppositional Gaze, expands on a tool which can assist in breaking the shackles of the male gaze along with its constituents and consequences. hooks doesn't suggest a cure, but only a potential to create a new paradigm that operates alongside the old; hopefully engulfing the old, over time. Getting to it, this tool is the oppositional gaze. The oppositional gaze is the gaze of resistance. The gaze that is overseen by an acute awareness of what it is gazing upon; Seeing the truth of oneself reflected or not reflected in what is being visually absorbed. hooks discusses the gaze of the black slave being a point of resistance for the slave. It was forbidden for a slave to gaze upon the white slave owner. The black slave gazed anyway. This gaze was a way to resist power and domination. The resistant gaze evolved into power for slaves to see the truth and to be empowered by it.

Out of this was born the oppositional black gaze that hooks speaks of "It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing independent black cinema." hooks focuses on the black female, who has resisted her own negation in cinema. The images of black women were there only to imitate and reinforce the supremacy of white people. Black cinema made by black females was a need that rose out of the empowerment of the oppositional gaze.

The oppositional gaze is a tool I, and all women, can use when utilizing any visual medium. I have witnessed myself reacting, involuntarily, to the effects of the male gaze: having to live up to a standard. I have worked to identify what my true sexuality is, not the sexuality I've inherited from our dominant male structure. Like John Berger wrote about a woman's relationship to her sexuality, "Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own." I wonder, in this lifetime, if I will ever experience my equality and sexual identity in its most natural form; as it was intended.