The Male Gaze and Patriarchy

        When talking about any concept, I believe it is important to break down all aspects of it to fully understand the meaning. Take the term “male gaze” and break it down. “Gaze” is a concept that is used for visually analyzing something and how an audience observes the people or person presented. This gaze can be broken down in to the surveyor and the surveyed. The surveyor being the audience and the surveyed being the people or person being observed. Adding the word “male” to the term indicates that this audience is comprised of males. Reading Berger’s work, it becomes clear that the male gaze was and still is present in a vast majority of art and media across all platforms. To sum a large concept up in to a simpler meaning, the male gaze is typically when men occupy an audience of some sort of visual media that either objectifies or sexualizes women. This sort of objectification dehumanizes women in turn making them feel subordinate to men in society. Berger explains how this construct changes the way women think of themselves in relation to others around them when he says:

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. Her own sense of being in herself is supplemented by a sense of being          appreciated as herself by another (Berger 46).

The male gaze has created this false construct that a woman’s image of herself and self-esteem is build off of the “gaze” men appose upon women. This also confuses the idea of “beauty” because it becomes difficult to differentiate between what men and women consider it. This is seen in “The Judgement of Paris” painted by Rubens, Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful. Thus Beauty becomes competitive. Those who are not judged are not beautiful. Those who are, are given the prize” (Berger 52).

The male gaze can be attributed to another term “patriarchy”.  This term is a concept that men are naturally dominate allowing them to exercise this power in society. Men are taught that they are entitled and that they are superior to those around them. Bell Hooks defines patriarchy in her work “The Will to Change” as:
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).
The patriarchy can be dated back through religious texts. People are taught that God is a male and that, “God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to a powerful man” (Hooks 18). Women are brought up being told what a woman is “supposed to do” and how she is “supposed to act” to and around a man. This very concept can be directly tied to the male gaze. Men are brought up thinking they have this sense of entitlement which in turn also makes them think it is okay to objectify and sexualize women in the visual arts the way that they do.

Reading further in to these topics I find myself spotting the male gaze and patriarchy across all sorts of mediums whether it be television or hundreds of years old paintings. This awareness has also prompted me to start thinking about some of my own actions and art that I create in my free time. Things I once thought were “normal” seem to actual line right up with the male gaze and although at the time I was unknowingly feeding in to this, I now plan on going back to right my wrongs and reworking my art stray away from these concepts. While writing this post, I was also holding a conversation with my mother (who says she “would always recognize that certain things were made for men” but never knew there was a term for it) about the topic. She brought up a movie called “Thelma and Louise” because to her it was one of the first female positive movies she could remember watching with her cousins. I agreed to watch it with her and did some research on it myself only to find that there is a plethora of information regarding this movie and a reinvented “female gaze”. The film stars two women in bad relationships who go on a vacation filled with action, comedy, and sex. The female gaze is not an exact counterpart to the male gaze. Even though the intended audience is female, their gaze is not geared toward objectifying and sexualizing men. This movie portrays the female gaze by giving a female audience these powerful women smashing gender boundaries and expressing their anger towards the patriarchy.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing; a Book Made by John Berger. Viking Press, 1973.
Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. 21 Dec. 2004

Rubens, Peter Paul. The Judgement of Paris.

“Thelma & Louise.” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt0103074/mediaviewer/rm2942679808.