The Male Gaze

“And the eyes of the both were opened and they knew that they were naked.” “Unto the woman God said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and they conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee” (The Bible Genesis 3)

"The male gaze occurs when the viewer or the audience is put in the perspective of a heterosexual male.  The woman is the subject of the visuals, but rather portrayed as a woman, she is objectified for not only the audience, but for the creator of the visuals as well." It is nothing more than a reflection of mans subconscious need to assert control and power over an object, in this case (women) to make him feel powerful, to validate his manhood. Berger alludes to the fact when he said “a man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If it is large and credible his presence is striking”. “This presence suggests what a man is capable of doing to you and for you, and is always towards a power which he exercises on others.” While women’s presence on the other hand tends to express her attitude to herself surveying everything she is and everything she does for his approval in order to feel complete. I wonder if this is the reason why women so desperately want to marry. (Berger)

 Why the "male gaze" is a pervasive in popular culture has to do with how we have been socialized to believe an ideology that subscribes to a discourse that allows men to treat women as inferior, as second class citizens with a desire and singular purpose which occurred as a result of her punishment for her disobedience when she ate of the forbidden fruit as depicted in the Bible in the book of Genesis “To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.".

 Berger’s here presents us with a more modern version, in his statement about how “women are taught early in their childhood to behave this way "a woman surveys everything she is and everything she does and how she does it because how she appears to others in particular how she appears to men is of crucial importance for it is normally thought of as the success of her life."  Women have always been depicted as an object of mans desire, his trophy and will forever continue to compete for the prize, as described in The Judgment of Paris where he awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful. (Berger)

 The "oppositional gaze" stares in the face of domination.” It is both subject and verb- “looks and “looking”. "By asserting controls over the images and structures that attempt to marginalize, dominate, and exclude, black women all came as a result of the many enduring negative views and stereotypes of Black women— negative only because they contrast so strongly with European ideals of beauty—trace their roots to Western conceptions of difference was steeped in explorers’ observations of the distinctly un-European peoples on the African continent, views of the African female as a hypersexual being find their basis in what explorers determined phenotypic markers of overt sexuality. (http://jbeilke.iweb.bsu.edu/politicsofhate/oppositional_gaze.

"The ideal that Black women were not really women at all, but rather animals- and should be treated as such is one that has resonated throughout history despite  its basis in evidence that is not even circumstantial at best. It is not surprising that such negativity imagery of black women pervades society to this day.

“Perhaps the most crippling deterrent to positive interpersonal—and more specifically, interracial or international—relations, ethnocentrism has manifested itself for ages in the immensely distorted and unflattering depictions of African and African American women propagated by the Western world".. http://blackpraxis.wordpress.com 

Although "challenging authority, being denied the right to gaze, repressing ones' gaze was a form of survival for blacks during this period, black women found courage to declare not only will I stare, I want my look to change reality. (http://jbeilke.iweb.bsu.edu/politicsofhate/oppositional_gaze

When I watch television videos of beautiful, young, strong, talented black females gyrating their bodies in front of video cameras, scantily clad for the sake of pleasing the male gender, degrading them.  My gaze turns to shame, and sadness as I painfully notice the harmful effects of a patriarchal system asserting controls over her body has returned to destroy another generation of black beauty in an attempt to marginalize, dominate, and exclude, black women from the scene.

 The female body politic displayed in music videos, exposing female body parts gyrating provocatively for the male pleasure, the eye of the camera watching, waiting to see who will end up winning the "prize", to be owned by the judge. "Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not permissible within her presence. ”Every one of her action- whatever its direct purpose or motivation- is read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. Men survey women before treating them". (Berger p46)

There is a decline in American values. Sexual promiscuity and the explosive market of the female body politic is used by corporations to sell every product on the market in exchange for a gaze. To deconstruct the ideology of male dominance in this country, women must "deny men the right to gaze by using it as a form of resistance to the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking". (Bell Hook)