(image source: Sociological Images)
I think part of the reason it is so pervasive in popular culture, is because it is pervasive within ourselves. Girls, most critically in adolescence, are taught by the male gaze of the media what it is to be a woman, and thus perform it accordingly and very often unquestioningly. To have this way of seeing ourselves impressed upon us at such a formative period of our lives, makes the binary oppression internalized. Berger says, "This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity." (p.63)
The sheer repetition of images of women within the male gaze in popular culture is impossible to ignore, and overwhelming to combat. Many women respond to this insurmountable inequality by making a "patriarchal bargain." Professor Lisa Wade, from Occidental College, describes it as: a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact. A textbook example of this is the celebrity of Kim Kardashian:
2.) The "oppositional gaze" is a form of critical spectatorship that challenges the male gaze that replicates systems of gender, racial, sexual, and socioleconomic oppression. Bell Hooks says, "Even in the worst circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency."(pg 116) Spaces of agency exist [for black people], wherein we cn both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. (Hooks, 116) Politicizing "looking" relations in all structures of domination is important in deconstructing larger cultural attitudes and to move towards (conservatively) less oppression and (hopefully) shifting cultural paradigms over time.
These images from a clothing catalog can be evaluated with an oppositional gaze. The white woman is modeling a sweater, but why is the woman of color not also? She is basically a prop in these photos, which is degrading.
3.) Women viewers have, over the last decade, expressed growing displeasure over their depiction as subjects whose well-being depends on how men see them. One of the biggest struggles has been the realization that much of a woman's self conception is from the perspective of men, and how deeply we have internalized that viewpoint. I think (or rather know)that many women do not consciously understand that their self surveillance is, much like an internal monologue can be in another's voice, not their own. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself....she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself.(Berger, 47)The duality of our self consciousness is so familiar, that it is unnoticeable until we are implored to question and examine it. The power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and culotivating "awareness" politicizes "looking" relations--one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. (Hooks, 116) I am not really sure how to survey myself purely from a female gaze. To envision myself without the default parameters I am used to applying. Can that exist?
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