Male gaze is described as being a phenomenon seen throughout art and media done by male artists where the main focus of the artwork is a woman being objectified. The male gaze is seen everywhere from paintings, movies, commercials and advertisements. Women are overly sexualized for the pleasure of their male audience. As described by John Berger, “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” (Berger 47). Women become the central focus of the artwork, in a way that isn’t meant to empower her or to worship her. She is put in the spotlight to be consumed, to be vulnerable, to be spectated. An example of artwork that depicts the male gaze would be the famous “The Storm” by Pierre Auguste Cot. This painting depicts a male and female, but the female is shown to be wearing cloth that is transparent and shows her nudity as compared to her male counterpart. The painting also shows the female not looking at the male counterpart in the artwork, but away from him. Berger speaks about how the females in paintings done under the male gaze seem to show a pattern of women looking away from the main focus and out to their spectators. The male gaze is also heavily present in advertisements. In a documentary called “Killing Us Softly” based off a lecture by Jean Kilbourne, it highlights the images of women in advertising under the male gaze that display sexual objectification, misogyny, and gender stereotypes. These advertisements perpetuate images that are destructive towards the self esteem of women, and that depict sexual violence or degradation of women in society. As for patriarchy defined by Bell Hooks, she describes it as being “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 the maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.” (Hooks 18). Patriarchy in society is consisted of being male-centered, male-dominated, and male-identified. Women are controlled and held back by standards that make them feel small in the spaces that they occupy. Fear plays a huge role in why patriarchy still exists and why it has such a strong prevalence in society.
Work Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. 1972. Print.
Hooks, Bell. "Understanding Patriarchy." The Will to Change. Atria Books: 2004.
| The Storm by Pierre Auguste Cot |
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