Take a Look

           A gaze, in the simplest form, is defined as looking steadily or attentively. Harmless enough. From this basic concept, the idea of the male gaze has evolved as the notion that there is not one uniform view of the world; more specifically for our purposes, of the world of media and specifically film. Instead of a uniform view, we view the world through a male gaze, because that is what the world itself presents to us. It is not necessarily that we ourselves have been trained to view certain things, but that the world of the media has chosen one specific path to portray the world through, and this path is the male gaze through which there is a disparity between the significance and relevance of men and women.

As John Berger puts it simply, the male gaze can be described as the concept that: “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at… The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object… of vision: a sight” (Berger, 47). I have the most difficulty with the second part of this argument. I guess that the idea that “men look at women” doesn’t seem unusual at all to me because from what I know, that is the way it has always been: men as predator and women as prey, putting it in rough terms. It is not that I approve of this formula but more that I have accepted it as the customary way of how things are: “men look at women.” But what I truly have a problem with, and what actually truly captures the essence of the male gaze, is that women, too, watch themselves, “the surveyor of woman in herself is male.” So not only are men looking at women, but women are also looking at women as male, through a male’s eyes, with a male gaze.

            The real problem, of course, is never simply because of the act of looking. The implications of the male gaze are that women are looked as objects of attraction, as selling points and works of art. Flattering? Not at all. This puts women in the position of an unceasing awareness of their appearance, because after all, that is what holds their value, according to the male gaze. Thus, as Laura Mulvey puts it in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” “woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” (Mulvey, 834). That last part really encapsulates the perverted inequality behind the concept of the male gaze, that woman is “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Taking this a step further, the meaning that is being bared is not only made but also defined by men; so she doesn’t make meaning or interprets it, but simply wears the meaning that man clothes her with. This is regarding the woman are surveyed, and when we think of the woman as surveyor, she is also looking at the surveyed through the goggles that man has created for her.

            Running with the concept of goggles, Bell Hooks in The Oppositional gaze, demonstrates that we are wearing more than the pair that silences women as bearing any innate meaning. Maybe the idea of filters is more adequate than goggles, and fits a bit better. Where Berger and Mulvey are discussing the male gaze as, say, a blue filter, that allows the viewer to view only as a male, Hooks adds to that image a white filter that focuses not only on the absence of women but specifically black women. This second filter is what creates the need for the oppositional gaze. The oppositional gaze puts up a fight against the claim that film is not only encouraging and advocating a patriarchal world, but a white supremacist world as well. As she puts it in “The Oppositional Gaze,” “to stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation…it was the oppositional black gaze that responded.

            The male gaze is grounded on the concept that, as Mulvey puts it, “pleasure [arises] in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (Mulvey, 836-837). It is exactly for this reason that the male gaze is a pervasive form of vision in popular culture. We like to look; not just men but people in general are visual. The difference is that men, for the most part, get to choose what the media will show and what will eventually land before our eyes. It is for this reason that women are so thoroughly and really unnervingly objectified in the media. And since woman is both surveyed and surveyor, she takes this depiction of what men consider adequate, and goes through endless struggles to achieve it. In this way, she is never good enough. In my opinion, the worst part of this, as I alluded to in the beginning, is that women do this to themselves. They cannot liberate themselves of this blue filter in order see the reality of the big picture. So they judge not only themselves harshly but in an anguish of inadequacy and incompetence, judge other women even more harshly. There is a limited amount of action we can take over the movie that is being shown, but just like with the disposable glasses given out in 3D movies, we can choose to remove these filters constantly covering our eyes and find the truth; which is honestly never further than where we stand.