Post 1 The Male Gaze

Adam Holly

Art and Women 

September 15th 2019

The Male Gaze is pervasive both in art and in popular culture in a various amount of ways to view from a historical perspective ranging to present times. Historically, we can all agree that in past civilizations women have been always treated differently from men. The Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, and many more as centuries have passed show that women were nothing more than just a reward for men.

       At times, women were beaten, raped, murdered, and others were glorified, Aphrodite; an ancient Greek goddess that was associated with pleasure, beauty, love, passion and the most important procreation. In as a whole if you were not part of royalty or someone who was important to the crown, you were seen as not having rights at all. Women did not have many rights as for men who had way more. Men were capable of engaging in politics and women were not even capable of being present in an educational setting.

     Ages ago, women did not have any real rights such as men did and unfortunately, they were seen as an object or a trophy. According to John Berger, a very renown English art critic and poet has said “Men act, and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” This quote has shown that a woman’s manifestation conveys her own attitude to herself, in which dictates and directs what can occur to her and what cannot. In Ways of Seeing, the male gaze is described as the way men view women. Berger emphasizes “to be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men” (Berger, 46). Berger expounds on the relationship between the “surveyor” and the “surveyed” - men are the former and women are the ones that are the end of everything. Berger illustrates on such statements by stating 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 - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger, 47).

      The Male Gaze is pervasive in art and popular culture because the man’s observation is always forming to “the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (Berger, 64). Berger references the presence of nude women in European oil paintings and states “The nude in European oil painting is usually presented as an admiral expression of the European humanist spirit."

The picture to the above shows how the famous brand American Apparel has shown how to be perceived by the male even though the clothing is for women. A woman will automatically think from a psychological perspective that it is her who is in the picture and looks at her perfect mate when wearing the apparel.

 As for the female gaze, it has been noted that it is a feminist film theoretical term representing the gaze of the female viewer that is a response to Lauara Mulvey’s term “the male gaze”. Just like the “male gaze”, it is depicted to be seen by a woman’s perspective. In this concept it is based on three different views: (1) The first is the individual filming, (2) The second is the characters within the film, (3) Lastly, the spectator. The focus is mainly on the leads to understand and to show a story rather than a spectacle as the “male gaze” perceives them.  

Girls, Guerrilla. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, 1998.

Hooks, Bell. In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA, 1992.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London, England,1972.