Male and Oppositional Gazes

In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey describes how, in film, women are typically depicted as objects of gaze, and men as the possessors. This can be looked to as an explanation for why women in mainstream media are often (almost impossibly) beautiful, thin and tall. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 837). Although there are films out there that feature female protagonists, most mainstream, Hollywood movies are prime examples of seeing through the male gaze, showing women being observed, and men as the observers. The term can also be applied to advertising, for everything from shoes to promoters of animal rights (hello, Peta!), and even art.

John Berger explores this concept in European art, saying that the female model is often shown directly to the artist or indirectly through a mirror, viewing herself as the artist views her. “

A woman must continually watch herself…How a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated,” he explains (Berger 46). Further analyzing nude paintings, he points to one in particular and draws the conclusion that, “those who are not judged as beautiful are not beautiful. Those who are, are given the prize” (52).

Hooks takes into consideration not only gender, but also race. Describing having been repeatedly punished as a child for staring and reading about whites who punished their slaves for looking at them, Hooks proposes the idea that one’s gaze can be dangerous. Blacks could feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by daring to look, and“…attempts to repress our black peoples’ right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze,” she states (Hooks 116). Trying to control their gaze had only had only created an irresistible desire to look. In The Oppositional Gaze, Hooks encourages black females to look upon the stereotypes portrayed in films with a critical eye, an oppositional gaze.

Before reading this essay, I hadn’t considered the oppositional gaze. I had only complained of the male gaze and how it reduced ads for animal rights to naked Playboy models and sneaker ads to cropped photos of women’s legs and butts. I also hadn’t given much thought to the male gaze when it came to European nudes. It was something that was lightly touched upon in one of my art classes, but never analyzed or discussed in length. These concepts are both fairly new to me, introducing that the idea of the male gaze came to fruition much earlier than I had previously thought, and affects different women in different ways.

Whenever someone tries to convince me that I have an unrealistic idea of what my body should look like, I always say, “I blame the media”. The male gaze is a pervasive form of vision in popular culture primarily because it sells. It gives males something nice to look at and gives females something to try (and fail) to emulate, a body they wish they could have, a hairstyle they wish they could wear, etc.