Ways of Seeing

The male gaze is defined as the masculine, heterosexual, and usually white perspective that shapes basically everything from advertisements to films, it plays an important role by defining women as weak and subservient. Laura Mulvey, argues that through the male gaze there is a strong power relationship in which the spectator, being the male, can indirectly possess the object, the female (Mulvey 840). This perspective has long dominated the mass media landscape simply because those with power in our society are usually white, heterosexual males. It is a pervasive form of vision in popular culture because it is maintained constantly and any opposition to this perspective is quickly annihilated. I remember a few years back, there was an advertisement from a beer company and it involved a gay couple and a straight couple, but you couldn’t tell the couples apart. There was so much hate for this advertisement and many of its opponents claimed that they were okay with homosexuality but why did it need to be shoved down their throats. Following this comment, there was a long thread of other advertisements featuring overly sexualized women and their male counterparts. I found it hilarious but also alarming, I had never paid much attention to how many advertisements were rooted in the hypersexuality of women and the importance of heterosexuality.

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In Ways of Seeing, John Berger makes several interesting points regarding the male gaze and viewership as a whole. His argument is founded by the idea that “men look at women” and “women watch themselves being looked at” (Berger 47).  This statement clearly identifies the power relationship that comes along with the idea of viewership, in which men are powerful because they are the spectators and can make their own perceptions of what they are looking at, while women are weak because they are simply objects to be looked at. Throughout Ways of Seeing, Berger uses several examples of paintings to illustrate the objectification of women and the male gaze. I found it very interesting that he used paintings because it showed that the idea of the male gaze has been along for a very long time and it will be very difficult to challenge.

While reading Berger I was reminded of a documentary I have seen called Heaven by Tracey Moffatt. The documentary was trying to reverse roles, in terms of the male gaze. In a nutshell, Tracey Moffatt recorded several males at the beach changing from their swimsuits into their regular clothes. After viewing this documentary, one of my classmates commented that she enjoyed the documentary because it put the males on the spot and made them feel uncomfortable, similar to how many women feel on an everyday basis. Shortly after this, one of the males stated that he hated this documentary because it illustrated the ‘female gaze’ and that the filmmaker was only interested in the males for their appearance. Overall, I found the discussion to be very interesting especially because all of the women in the room were in agreement and liked the film because of the way it handled the male gaze, while all the men in the room disliked the film and couldn’t understand the motives behind it.

The oppositional gaze is a rebellious act that calls for black people to look at and challenge whiteness. It has strong roots in slavery, in which slaves were denied their right to gaze at their white masters  and as a result of this denial a rebellious desire came into fruition that Bell Hooks calls the oppositional gaze (Bell Hooks 115). She notes that the oppositional gaze developed with television, because blacks were able to freely look, although they were aware that the mass media images they were presented with was focused on maintaining and reproducing white supremacy. But alas, with knowledge comes power, and just to see portrayals of black people meant that they learned how whites viewed them and how it differed from how they viewed themselves. I found it especially important that Bell Hooks noted how black looks were rarely concerned with gender. However, when gender was involved, black women were largely seen as objects of the male gaze (Hooks 118). This was very interesting to me because it reminded me of intersectionality, and that all women are not viewed the same just because they are women. Instead they are viewed differently by all the identities such as race, class, sexuality, they claim.

While reading Bell Hooks, I was reminded of an article I read about Scandal. It discussed the various tropes that Olivia, the main character, succumbed and rejected simultaneously. The tropes included the slave mistress, the help, and the Jezebel (Gomez and McFarlane) After reading this article, I was upset because I had never noticed these tropes, instead I was very grateful to see a major network carry a show with an African American female lead. (This has not happened since the 1970s with the development of Julia). Since then, my viewing habits have changed, I often find myself criticizing shows for their lack of representation or when they feature actors of color their portrayals are often lacking depth and stereotypical. Although there is still a long way to go in terms of representation in the media, there have been several improvements and at least that’s something.

Works Cited:

Berger, John. Chapters 2,3. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1972.

Gomez, Stephanie L., and Megan D. McFarlane. "It's (Not) Handled": Race, Gender and Refraction in Scandal. Feminist Media Studies, 17 Aug. 2016

Hooks, Bell. In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992: 115-131.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. NY: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-844.