Man-made Media

From the top players to most of the low level creators, James Brown said it best. It’s a Mans (media) World. In this world, men create the images of themselves and of women. In media, Man is God and women are just an object to be played with, altered, and used. The male “gaze” shapes how women are looked at and seen in the media. John Berger states “in the traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance code for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” From ads, to art, and other forms of media that I have come in contact with, women are often used as a prop. Not the object they are selling but a device used to sell sex, thus selling the product.
It’s simple to look into a maxim magazine and see the male gaze in full effect, women with no clothing, advertising clothes and female sex symbols selling beer. But what we don’t realize as media consumers is that the male gaze has a strangle hold on our everyday media intake. From cigarette ads using sex to sell to male underwear ads finding a way to use women as an object or prop, we constantly see this male gaze being used. Even in classic art, as explained in the Berger’s essay, we see how women are painted in a way that they are being looked at by all who gaze the art. In some cases these women “know” they are being looked at and in some cases the audience acts like a voyeurs to the object painted.
When thinking of the male gaze you have to ask yourself, who is the audience? And the simple answer to that are men. Men not only make the media but are seen by these makers as the biggest consumer. Although this may have been true at an earlier point in time, this generation has seen more of a balance of the people who consume media. Whether it be black, white, male or female, the people looking aren’t just men.
bell Hooks challenges the norm views when she introduces the idea of the oppositional gaze. After explaining the end of a period where blacks were often shun and killed for being “social onlookers,” Media helped blacks gain their own gaze. Although this gaze had been gained, the view and depiction of the black women had yet to be tapped. The black woman was simply either a mirror image of the white woman or a view of what the white woman wasn’t. bell Hooks works to take back this image, claiming that the black women needed her own identity and it wasn’t the role of the black-male gazer to give it to her.
This idea made me look back at all the black women portrayals I’ve seen over the years. From big mammies to sex vixen that were no different from the white sex vixen, these images seem to come from a place that didn’t fully understand the black women. And I realized that unless women are made into media creators, these male based depictions can never change. We as media consumers and makers can only create what we gaze in our own mirrors.