To BE or To Be Looked At? Women: You are capable of much more than being looked at.

[Remember Me]

11. It's called "the male gaze" --

and here are my notes about it:

(re women's Fashion magazine and advertising poses, which show women as subordinate -- or they would be subordinate poses except that they show powerful women -- Hollywood stars -- who know they are controlling the male gaze.)
http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/powerpose/index.html

The problem is, however, that most women make less money and have less power than most men, and the message that goes out to women without power is that to get some, you need to gain control of a male view of women -- which means to get power through male power, rather than on your own.

This is where the theory of the male gaze becomes important. John Berger once noted, "Men 'act' and women 'appear.' Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." (Ways of Seeing , p. 47)

...There is a long tradition in Western art of representing men as viewers, and women as viewed. It continues in modern advertising.

... (again, in Berger's words), "Women watch themselves being looked at." Women are acculturated to look at themselves through the eyes of an imagined man because the ideal spectator is always assumed to be male. As a result, "Female models in ads addressed to women 'treat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker' (Paul Messaris).

... The question of who has power and wealth, and how this woman is gaining access to it, needs not be asked: women get power from men by using their looks.
http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/powerpose/power.html

Links to other material: http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/powerpose/links.html


Read excerpt from Wanting to be Wanted, by Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD, a psychoanalyst
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0609805304/ref=sib_fs_top/105-7769261-0103624?ie=UTF8&p=S00M&checkSum=A2hQvwtmWT9EnxX4S4eSTMCFYzpftAHRVwTxDD9Nit4%3D#reader-link

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Edited to add bold above, and to say that I wonder what would happen -- to fashion, to advertising, to our personal power, to us as individual female humans -- if we weren't trained to see OURSELVES and each other through the imagined male gaze? What if, instead, we were free to define beauty and well-being purely for ourselves?