Post 1

Kirubel Tekle
9/12/2019
Prof. Cacoilo
Post 1

Male Gaze and Patriarchy

Art is known to be an expression of one’s self through creative means. This includes music, poetry, paintings, sculptures, etc. Through an artist’s work, something is being told. It is up to the viewer to decide the message being told. The expression is based on what is shown. An example is nudity. Throughout history nudity tends to catch people’s attention, and this is one of the reasons it is put in art. However when it comes to mude art, women tend to take part in it more than men. This is most likely due to patriarchy, system that goes against gender equality and make women inferior. Given how patriarchy has given men more control of the world throughout time, it lead to the male gaze, the need to sexualize women based on how they appear. Bell Hooks goes in depth on how much power patriarchy has given males over females in her piece, “The Will to Change.” The male gaze also puts women in a position as if they are not human, and John Berger goes into that in “Ways of Seeing.” With both patriarchy and male gaze involved in how to define art, it goes to show how much influence women have over how the world works.
Hooks’s piece explains how patriarchy itself has shaped the way the world works for women. Imagine a system that is totally against someone given what they are. This is discrimination, and it has played a huge role in women’s lives. Hooks states, “Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence,” (Hooks 18).People already have their status and role depending on the gender someone is born too. If someone is born a woman, then just like that they are deemed weak, and this puts a bad name to this gender. Men are deemed to be strong. Being strong comes in different ways. The system of patriarchy believes that in order to be this way, violence and terrorism is required. Just because someone is born male, does not mean they are like this. Hooks goes into this by writing down, “To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings,” (Hooks 22). There are men who do not want to be violent in any manner, but some are forced and end up being miserable. If there are men who do not want to be strong, then there is a possibility of women who want to be. The only thing getting in the way of that is the system. While it is ruining women who are to be weak, it also ruins men by rewarding them to be aggressive.
The male gaze has done nothing but make men feel better about themselves and women feel as if they are just some thing to look at as explained in Berger’s piece. As long as there are things that result in the male gaze, society will continue to look at females this way.

Renoir, Great Bathers, 1918. (Musee d’Orsay)

Berger goes into the need for the male gaze by stating, “Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it,” (Berger 46). Image for females is everything. When women wear certain things such as shorts, they are being seen. Berger would believe this to not be approved because men tend to do things with female bodies, and this includes watching them. It can possibly turn into touching, so it is important that women watch what they wear. At the same time, Berger’s point of view seems a bit ludicrous. This is due to the fact that clothes do not make much of a difference because it does not really stop men from having sexual thoughts. Even if they were to be physical, it is often times that the man tends to get away with it, and sometimes he is even rewarded. Events like this are popular both in the modern world and back then. Berger exposes to his audience, “The nakedness is not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it is a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands. (The owner of both woman and painting.) The painting, when the king showed it to others, demonstrated this submission and his guests envied him,” (Berger 52). Feelings like this make the male gaze pervasive in art and pop culture. As long as images that give men sexual thoughts exist, it will continue to be popular. Given the patriarchal system, it will always be men who will have their needs filled to when it comes to these feelings and not women. This is most likely why the female gaze is not really heard of.
I have come to understand these structures as both discriminant and insulting given the root of it all, patriarchy. It has brought in a serious form of sexism against women that is still in effect presently. Even though there is a new legacy of female acceptance into superiority, there were also thousands of legacies of inferiority. As long as this is remembered, will the world truly be ready to accept women to be as equal as men?

Work’s Cited

“Chapter 3.” Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, British Broadcasting Corporation, 2008, pp. 45-64
“Chapter 2.” Understanding Patriarchy, by Bell Hooks, Louisville Anarchist Federation Federation, 2010, pp. 17–33.