Post # 2 - Gazes, by Janis Mahnure

The male gaze is a term coined with the objectivity of women. It refers to women being portrayed attractive to the audience which is always assumed to be a man. It’s a pervasive form of vision in popular culture because all women in media are created for man. We females have a hard time relating to women in media because we don’t relate ourselves to be objects of men.

John Berger in “Ways of Seeing” says “One might simplify this by saying: “Men act and women appear” (Berger 47). This statement really resonated with me because it fits into all of the discourse in regards to women and media. Women only appear. This is why women are so obsessed with their looks – men, more specifically the male gaze, forced her to be this way. I’ve seen ads from the 80s where skinny girls were not deemed attractive because they didn’t have some blubber on them. But ads now show almost only skinny girls. The male gaze determined whether she should be a full-figured women, or a petite young lady. Thus, women in each era of time decided they had to be a certain way in order to identify with the girls in the ads.

Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” says "Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and  passive/female" (Mulvey 837). This is taking Bergers previous statement a step further. The women in the piece of media must be passive for the man to feel his masculinity. She must only appear, and the man will do the acting. Recently, a flyer I saw really depicted this notion of women being created for man:

The Oppositional Gaze by Bell Hooks, is critique of racism in media. Bell Hooks refers specifically to cinema and says, "Even when representation of black women were present in film, our bodies and being were there to serve, enhance, and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze" (Hooks 119). She uses the term “racial purity”, expressing the notion that white women were superior to black women and therefore black women could not be shown as they were. In class we discussed that making a black women stronger than her husband and having control of the husband shows that the black husband is inferior; not like the white husband who always has control over his stoic white housewife. There was a gif set I saw on tumblr recently that may have made me laugh before discussing these articles but now just makes me realize how engraved these concepts are in society.

Discussing all of these things helped me realize the flaws in our media. I always knew about the objectivity of women and using sex as a selling point but I never realized to what extent the passivity of women and even the racism was actually in the media. But I also want to introduce another question that has been bugging me: what about the Southeast Asia women? When I flip through Disney channel or soapoperas and tv-shows, I see women of different races. Yes, they may be stereotypical, but they exist: the white women, the black women, the latina women, the Asian women. What happened to the “brown” women? Where are we? Which comedy show has a brown women? Only recently did a show have a brown man (Parks & Recreation) and even then the show isn’t good. I want to know where I fit in. Where am I in the media?