Male Gaze and Patriarchy

The male gaze was developed by Laura Mulvey who was a feminist film critic. Mulvey published her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975. She defined the male gaze as the perspective of the world and women from a man's point of view. The male gaze is the way men objectify women and treat them like they are something they own. “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at … Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger 47). In society, the male gaze is when a man looks at a woman to find them desirable, and women should feel flattered if a male finds them attractive. “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life” (Berger 46). It shows how women have to be worthy of a man’s attention since it is a woman's job to please men. If a woman is attractive in a man’s eyes, they are successful in life because the man will take care of her.
The male gaze is still problematic in today’s society because it oppresses women to feel worthless and makes them feel as if their duty is to entertain men. “Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own” (Berger 55), so they can not do what they want but instead do what their husband wants. Other problems the male gaze gives to women in society is catcalling, which is when men will talk or yell at women to prove that they have control over them and to show their superiority and power over them. Other examples of the male gaze are shown in films and magazines, but some people do not even see or recognize it. Since the male gaze is everywhere and it is so common, people tend not to say anything about it or not even notice that it is there.

Mulvey also discusses the female gaze in her essay, which is when women look at themselves and other women from a man's point of view. To use the female gaze, women would have to use society’s norms and inequalities that a man would use for the male gaze. The female gaze could be used by women to putting themselves in a man's shoes to see the man’s perspective of the world and women.

Le Déjeuner Sur l’herbe
Painted by Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, 1862

The painting shows a picnic with a woman nude, another woman barely dressed and two men fully dressed. There are three types of male gazes which are the male gaze of the person who made the artwork, the male gaze of the people in the artwork, and the male gaze of the viewer of the artwork. Le Déjeuner Sur l’herbe represents the male gaze by having the nude woman looking at the spectator of the painting to please the male viewer. Having the women nude show how she is trying to impress the viewer to find her attractive and desirable. Compared to the women’s body language depicted in the painting, the two men’s body language shows their power and authority over the women.

Picture of Zooey Deschanel on the cover of Cosmopolitan

She shows how the male gaze is applied and shown in media and advertising like magazines. Deschanel looking directly at the spectator of the picture shows how women look at the viewer to please them.

“Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (Hooks 18). Patriarchy is the system or monarchy of who holds the power in society, which are men. Patriarchy is when society puts more value in men than in women, which gives more privileges to men. Male dominance is shown in situations like a family where the father is the head of the household and brings in the income for his family, while the mother is the caregiver and has to depend on the husband to take care of everyone in the family financially. Patriarchy is sexist to family roles because it depicts a wife as the “caretaker” and the husband as the “breadwinner”. Just because of a women’s sex, they are looked at a certain way in society and they are expected to have certain gender roles and family roles that they have to follow. The family roles devalue the women’s roles and show how the man’s roles are superior. Patriarchy oppresses women so that she can make herself little to make her husband feel big and in control. It oppresses the women to not do what she loves or wants because she has to put her husband’s needs before her own.

“Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about growing up is the system of patriarchy, even if we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to us as children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can best fulfill these roles” (Hooks 17-18). Patriarchy is taught to children from a young age like what a boy and girl should or should not do and act like. From there, girls and boys are expected to follow these guidelines until they are adults. Growing up, I was taught the female gender roles and when I disobeyed them, my parents would tell me not to do that. My family taught me what was the right and wrong behaviors for women in society. Still, patriarchy is used with families giving their son more power than their daughter just because they are a boy and boys have the capability to protect themselves and be stronger. Most of society is still traditional, so they continue to follow the “norms” of family roles and gender roles. When people do not follow the “norm”, others will judges and harass them for not following the traditions that people are used to. Same goes to gender roles if men are not masculine and females are not feminine, they are shamed for going out of the “norm”. We have to start changing the gender roles and family roles now so that patriarchy would have less power upon our lives.

Both patriarchy and the male gaze discuss the dominance and control men have on women in society. Patriarchy and the male gaze changed my views about art and media because they opened my perspective on how there is sex discrimination everywhere that I have never noticed before. In the future, I can be more aware of what is shown in things like advertisements and know that it shows the concepts of patriarchy and the male gaze. As a society, we should push away the male gaze and patriarchy and treat everyone with respect and equality.

Work Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing; a Book Made by John Berger. Viking Press, 1973.

Borman. “What Is the ‘Male Gaze’?” Mary Janes Film, Mary Janes Film, 20 Feb. 2018, maryjanesfilm.com/what-is-the-male-gaze/.

Hooks, Bell. Understanding Patriarchy. Louisville Anarchist Federation Federation, 2010.