Male/Oppisitional Gaze - Post 2

GO Magazine

           The male gaze is a concept in film theory and media in which the subject matter is presented specifically for a heterosexual male.The ad on the left is a portrayal of modern use of male gaze. It's clearly targeting the male population because men are harder to attract unless you let them look at some sexy women. In movies the plot more often then not revolves around the main protagonist solving problems which ultimately lead to them getting a woman, or just movies with women as sexual objects being used/abused by men. There are chick flicks created to break free of the male gaze but even so the women are usually playing into the same stereotypes of chasing men and being sexual objects.
         

Vanity

          We see the male gaze being used in all around us but its not something new. In John Berger’s, “Way of Seeing” we learn that the male gaze was used in the past, back when oil canvas paintings were the main source of media. During the renaissance, paintings of naked women were popular and their main purpose was to please the person looking at it. Usually the owners of these paintings were the husbands of the women in the painting unless they were paintings of goddesses. Some men used these paintings to show off to their guests, they treated women as trophies and objects. We also learn from Berger that women are aware that men are watching them, women judge themselves as well to make sure that they are attractive to be looked at. “Men look at woman, Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves” (Berger, 47) This quote visualized in the picture called Vanity, pretty much mean that women live their lives to appeal to men and are reduced to objects. This is entrapment because if women do not look as best as they could they are not going to be looked at by men and wont have successful lives.
          In popular culture we can observe the use of male gaze in many of our advertisements.  From commercials on television to posters in the subway, there are always attractive women being portrayed. Using women for marketing is basically using their bodies as tools and unethical, but nonetheless it is not going away. The creators are seeing that these advertisements are catching people attention and helping sell the product so why change it? “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female… in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed.” (Mulvey, 837) This means that males are the ones participating in the watching and women are displayed as sexual objects.That quote states that woman are passive, so the woman are not fighting back against this intrusion of privacy. This relaxation can be seen as a sign that there is nothing wrong going on but at the same time it makes the women feel empty, like a shell, just used for their bodies and nothing more.

Nude woman in the passive position Mulvey talks about

           On the other hand the oppositional gaze is seeing media objectively rather than from the typical white heterosexual male way.  In the book The Oppositional Gaze, bell hooks mentions that movies are racist and sexist. hooks embraces the oppositional gaze because as a black woman she was not able to analyze the works with personal experience. During the movie she would have to discard who she was to analyze and enjoy the movie. bell hooks wrote a film criticism to Spike Lee, who is a black American film director, producer, writer, and actor. She stated “his work mimics the cinematic construction of white womanhood as object, replacing her body as text on which to write male desire with the black female body. Its transference without transformation.” ( hooks, 126) So even though there is a black man directing a movie he still follows the patriarchal system that has been used by the whites. Even though black people can make movies that doesn't mean they don't have some white guy watching over them telling them what they can and cant show. Before reading the text from bell hooks I did not realize how many movies are full of racism, sexism and stereotyping. As a white male I was too naive to realize how few black actors there actually are in movies.  It really opened my eyes to the discrimination plaguing the movie industry.

This man talks about a few movies and shares with us a glimpse of  a movie about black people which is still racist and how the Titanic movie doesn't even have his race present. These are things that white people like myself don't particularly notice when watching a film. But for everyone that isn't white this is a serious issue of misrepresentation.

1.Mulvey, Laura. "Women as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look." Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. N.p.: n.p., 1975. 837. Print.

2.Berger, John. "3." Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1973. 47. Print.

3.Hooks, Bell. "The Oppositional Gaze." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End, 1992. 121-22. Print.