Male Gaze

            We live in a society in which a women’s appearance means everything. They must look their best because they are constantly being judged on their physical appearance. When an attractive woman is walking down the street, she might catch the attention of “Male Gazers,” who see her not as a person but rather a sexual object. According to Berger “Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.” (pg 46) 

The male gaze creates that object and most of the time can be treated as being hostlie towards a female. 

From the popular t.v show "Mad Men"

Women have always been seen as something of male desire and we have seen this throughout the media. For example when you watch a car commercial and they seem to always describe the vehicle as they would a female, “Sleek lines, curves, and such. Advertising is generally designed to gain the attention of one audience and that’s the male population. The male glaze creates dominance and separates genders, the male being active and the female being passive. Laura Mulvey states “women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic spectacle: From pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.”(pg 838)  We have seen this in cinema as well; in which woman are being decremented by Hollywood’s desire to perceive them as objects. Personally a lot of romantic comedies portray women as being less then males. Movies in which there either a prostitute or love stuck over a guy that didn’t want them before but wants them now.  It's created by the individuals who control media's like film and television, mostly white males because it makes profit. 

Even though most males might not see looking at females bad, it does create a fear in the minds of the females being watched, especially when she doesn't want to be looked at as being this object. 

Model "Kate Upton" 

“the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the women is designed to flatter him.”(Berger 64) 

The male glaze despite being detrmental also doesn't focus on all women. It excludes women of color from the equation and only see's "white," as being the dominant desire. It creates racism and in the words of author bell hooks, it creates the oppositional gaze. The oppositional gaze is absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating representation in mass media. She talks about the longing to look, a rebellious desire for blacks, especially black females that weren't represented and subjected to white supremacy in film and television. "The "Gaze" has been and it a site of resistance for colonized black people people globally." (Hooks pg. 116) Even so, cienma didn't represented black-women hood in the appropriate light, we often see this in race type movies, in which black directors try to make create the actuallitly of life through a black perspective but often losses mass appeal. For example when we were talking in class about Spike Lee's style of film verse Tyler Perry's, one is trying to create a voice while the other is creating profit. Often playing exposing the sterotypes of blacks as white cinema does. "looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator."(Hooks pg. 122)