The scariest part about media is how drastically it can shape people’s minds and beliefs. The issue with a dominant aesthetic directed towards the male gaze is that it creates a problem for women that affects and involves everybody. Despite being coined by Laura Mulvey relatively recently, the male gaze is a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in world history, and it describes how media is created primarily for the likes of a male viewership. The male gaze involves visual work that is intended for men, with a concept that men’s needs, usually sexual needs, are to be catered to, specifically by women. Usually, this content includes a visual oversexualization of women, that transforms them from people to merely objects made to please men.
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| Despite being intended to be bought by woman, the woman's ad is sexualized and still created with a male gaze structure, assuming that woman want to be viewed sexually by men in whatever clothing they are wearing. |
What is an important concept that goes along with the male gaze is that these types of media hold “woman as image” and “men as the bearer of the look.” This in turn attributes “passive” qualities to women, and “active” qualities to men. (Mulvey, Pg 837) The issue with the male gaze is that it induces ideas that women’s bodies are not limited to men, that men have the right to look at them. John Burger as well touched upon this problematic notion and wrote in his book, Ways of Seeing, “you painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure. (Berger, Pg 51) He describes that while men have this outwardly right to sexualize women’s bodies, but once women take control of their own bodies, they immediately become vain.
Burger’s quote can be applied to the situation when several female celebrities ended up having their pictures, that were saved on their icloud, leaked onto the internet. People became obsessed with these pictures and googled them to view it for themselves. However, at one point, the internet began condemning these celebrities for taking such racy pictures in the first place, instead of being distraught that someone would invade someone else’s privacy and leak personal content to the public. It seemed as though it was alright for people to creep and search these personal nude pictures, but completely inappropriate and slutty for these celebrities to appreciate their own bodies by taking pictures of themselves for themselves. (Tumblr Post)
Another problem with a dominant male gaze deciding the content of media, is that it limits the window of opportunity for gay and lesbian couples to be featured in mass media. The irony of people who are homophobic, or those who just do want gay people “throwing it in their face,” is that images of straight couples, especially oversexualized images, are literally everywhere. Straight people are rubbing their heterosexuality onto gay people everyday through media, all because there is this idea of a male gaze controlling what media is being produced. If it doesn’t appeal to a man and his desires, then that style of media is not eligible to be produced to have a mass audience. (Tumblr Post)
The oppositional gaze came about as a response to the male gaze, and involves looking at media that was not intended to be made for black women, and also involves analyzing and critiquing such media. Bell Hooks describes how black people in general have been prohibited from looking, and were stripped of their power to “gaze” when there was still a slaveowner and slave dynamic. (Hooks Pg 115) However, when film came about, people of color were given the power to look at white people without being punished for it. Despite having this power to gaze, black women commonly found themselves not enjoying the content they were gazing at, because while black men could relate to white men in films on some level, black women could not relate to white women at all. As Hooks describes it, casting “ultra-white” women was a way to “perpetuate white supremacy.” (Pg 119) Due to this, Bell Hooks describes the importance of critiquing media content instead of “closing down critique” and “forgetting racism.” In order to address the issue of black women’s portrayal in film, or lack thereof, feminist film critics, and film critics in general, have to take into account “blackness and specifically representations of black womanhood.” (pg 124) Being able to analyze the media is a form of resistance to the order of things, and once more people begin confronting the problem, that is when solutions can be made.
A lot of people talk about the lack of representation of black woman in the media, which is a factor to why black women lack agency. If they have no representation for them in the media, then they will not have anyone to look up to, and won’t feel as though they can achieve greater things. For example, Disney princesses have existed since Snow White first came out in 1937. However, Disney did not have a black princess until 2009. So despite how amazing it was to finally have a black princess providing representation for people of color, and giving little girls a role model to look up to, it took Disney years to finally allow this. With the oppositional gaze, black women first critiqued the fact that Disney did not have a black princess. Once the movie came out, the oppositional gaze helped to critique whether or not the film was created without racial bias, which it kind of was. One of the many things wrong with that movie is that Disney’s first Black Princess spends majority of the film as a frog, so the movie lacks that progressive aspect because it does not even show Tiana as a person of color for most of her screen time.
Works Cited : Laura Mulvey : Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema // John Berger : Ways of Seeing // Bell Hooks : The Oppositional Gaze
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