There is Power in Looking.

The male gaze has been utilized throughout history as a technique to solidify women’s submissive position within society. As Mulvey states in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema “The male gaze is the ability to take erotic pleasure in looking at and/or turning someone, mainly women, into objects” (Mulvey 835). The act of looking is one that symbolizes power. The person who looks is claiming power over the one who is being looked at, therefore asserting ownership over the person at the receiving end. Popular culture has taken the male gaze and made it into a kind of reward for women who adhere to the norms and standards of what men find beautiful. Because of this, women are now forced to split themselves into two; the surveyor and the surveyed. John Berger explains, “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and untimely how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success in her life” (Berger 46). The male gaze has allowed for a women’s objective in life to be the appearance of physical perfection; to become a sight to be seen by men in order to gain their approval.

The media over the years has adopted the male gaze as the lens through which all forms of publishing has been framed. Movies, television, advertisements, music, and magazines have used the male gaze perspective to portray women as visions. Today’s media is filled with examples of how the male gaze plays into our popular culture. For starters, the majority of movies that include female roles only portray women who are under 125 pounds, pimple-free, wrinkle-free, and are of a lighter skin tone. Whenever a woman in a film is shown to be anything less than this standard of perfection she is usually cast as a subordinate. For example, MTV’s new television series “Awkward” that premiered earlier this summer portrays some of these disparities. In this series a 15 year old girl goes through the trials and tribulations of high school life. Although the main character is supposed to be portrayed as “awkward” she fits neatly into the category of women that are deemed acceptable within the male gaze scope. However, the antagonist of the series who is constantly making the protagonist’s life miserable is cast as a larger sized girl, who’s physical features do not adhere to the norms of “typical beauty.” Here it is seen that the girl who can be seen as somewhat of a bitch is made to look undesirable purposefully in order to promote the beauty of the protagonist.

Through the emergence of the male gaze as a form of popular culture, another form of gaze was also brought into development. In “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” Bell Hooks states that “there is power in looking” (Hooks 115). She goes on to explain that throughout history, African-Americans have been stripped of their power to look. Today there is the ability for African-Americans to look, however, they do not share the same vantage point as popular culture. “The ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional” (Hooks 116). The oppositional gaze is a response to the mainstream culture that is dominantly portrayed in the media. It stands to question, criticize, and acknowledge that there is a disparity between the viewers and the view.

Although the oppositional gaze that Bell Hooks is referring to in her piece mostly revolves around race, I feel that it has also developed to include a wider variety of women in general. For instance, the overly popularized form of fairy tale love stories can also be looked at with an oppositional gaze. Women look at the scenes of men professing their love with amazingly grand gestures and while they seem beautiful, it is realized that this is not reality. The oppositional gaze has developed to include these situations because many people, women especially, have come to realize how ridiculous these aspirations of perfection truly are. I am able to watch a movie and understand that the female protagonist is not me; that there is no room for me in this pretend movie world, and that I should not base my goals and aspirations on portrayals of events that do not pertain to me. Many women, including myself, can understand these things, but for some reason we still set our standards to match the male gaze.

I feel as though I have understood that these structures have been in place throughout my entire life, not only in movies and television, but in my ACTUAL life. I would not say that my understanding of these structures have altered the way that I view the media, because I am able to differentiate between myself and the symbols of women on television. The exploration of these structures has caused me to to take a look at how I play into all of this. I realize that no matter how much I do not want to take part in any of this, I take part in it every single day. Every day of my life I am the victim of the male gaze. Every day of my life I take the time out to put together a fashionable outfit, wash my face, assemble my hair. Does this mean that I am promoting the ideas of the male gaze, and therefore asking to be looked at by every man at a street corner? I really don’t think so. But I can say that I have felt the effects and the objectification of the male gaze too many times throughout my life, and that it definitely plays a significant role in who I am as a woman.

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