The Male Gaze.

                    The male gaze involves heterosexual men alertly looking into a woman's physical appearance. This includes if women wear more revealing clothing, having a great posture, and wearing wonderful makeup. Whether or not if women are intrigued from the gaze, there are negative aspects to it. There are men out there in the world sees women in the train, street, or bar and notice that they stand out. Whether women enjoy being gazed or become intimidated, there has to be on the back of their mind that they feel that men looking at them would either stalk them, or possible rape them.

                    Having the male gaze being a persuasive form of vision in popular culture starts from how the mainstream media portrays it. According to Laura Mulvey, she elaborates on talking about cinema offering a certain pleasure known as scopophilia. It is defined as having the pleasure to being looked at which allows the mainstream popular culture to judge one from skin, hair, clothing, and fine figure which could result to them being looked as a sexual object. This brings up that the male gaze is projected its fantasy on female figures. Mulvey states that women function on two different levels of eroticism. One is "an erotic object for the characters within the story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen." (Mulvey 838) The level shows women taking the gaze of the spectator during the film as the female and male characters make a sexual impact without disturbing the quality of the film. The sexual impact during the film allows the spectators' to take it into "no-man's land outside its own time and space." (Mulvey 838)

                    Men in their mind have to judge women before they can treat them in a certain way. In other words, "men act and women appear." Women constantly survey and watch themselves constantly. Berger states, "she is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. She can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping." (Berger 46) Women feel this way because they are depicted in a different aspect from men. Men don't have to worry about watching themselves as opposed to women. But then, there is a difference between femininity and masculinity. The ideal image for women is to flatter the men in any shape or form. In this case, "her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another." (Berger 46)

                    From Bell Hooks, she describes the oppositional gaze as black female spectators developing looking relations from a cinematic context. When black people watch television and films, they engage within the images as to engage in black representation. Also, most women try to look through ethnicity, gender, and language. For example, the black women when they watch a movie, they do not look to deep into race as one put, "I could always get pleasure from movies as long as I did not too deep." (Hooks 121) However, if one does "look deeply" into the movie, they would feel hurt from it because of the absence of no black females to be in sight throughout the films.

                   After reading these writings, I feel that some women may thrive to want that male gaze. For instance, if one was going to be attending a party that night, would be not want to "dress to impress?" In this sense, the woman wants to let others know she is the center of attention because of her looks. In some degree, there are some that wants to look as skinny as possible to show one can control her own weight along with putting on makeup to become lighter. In today's society, in advertisements, women actually look pale and slim which may be attractive to some. Back to what Berger said about women appearing to a man can decide on how he will treat her depends on her motivations. Overall, women may have that on the back of their minds when they constantly survey themselves hoping to be treated the way they want to be.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." 1975.

Berger, John. "Ways of Seeing." BBC Four-Part Television Series. 1972.

Hooks, Bell. "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators." In Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.