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In Hans Memling’s painting Vanity, the nude,
female subject is painted by the artist holding a
mirror to relieve the men of their guilt for
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We live in a society where the term ‘patriarchy’ literally means ‘men’ to most. Allan Johnson’s
The Gender Knot takes on the discussion of where we stand with gender roles at this point in time within our society. It is significant in this discussion to acknowledge that this a debate that dates way back in time and continues to be controversial. Johnson states in
The Gender Knot that, “A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women” (p. 5). As Johnson discusses, patriarchy is a society and a society is more than just it's population. This directly correlates to the concept of the male gaze.
John Berger says of women, “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life” (p. 46). Berger draws this connection to the concept of the male gaze to put forth the idea that we have allowed a society in which men believe that women exist to please them and fulfill their desires, while women struggle to live up to standards of beauty that are unreal. Women are also constantly being accused of everything or guilted in order to remove any sort of blame or guilt from men. If a woman is raped, we almost automatically question her: Why was she there? What was she doing? Similarly, in terms of art that exists, such as Hans Memling’s painting
Vanity, nude portraits of women were very common because it was painted with the male viewer’s pleasure in mind. However, many artists like Memling would place a mirror in the nude women’s hands so men do not feel guilty about staring at nude women. Instead, they would say that they were not guilty as the women were looking at themselves first in the mirror.
There are examples of how patriarchal our society is everywhere that we look. One significant part of a patriarchal society is that most often, men are paid more for most jobs than women working the same jobs are, regardless of qualifications. A modern day example that defeats these odds is Ellen Pompeo who plays Dr. Meredith Grey on
Grey’s Anatomy. It was revealed recently that Ellen Pompeo is the highest paid woman on television with a whopping $20 million salary. Pompeo recently revealed her salary to set an example for the women in Hollywood who are so afraid to ask for more and what they deserve in comparison to their male counterparts. Pompeo let the press know that she fought endlessly to get what she deserved and earlier in the show’s history when Patrick Dempsey was still on the show, the network would just threaten to get rid of her character (although the show is entirely based on her character) because they had Dempsey to take her place, just so that she would not get paid more. She also reveals that as soon as Dempsey was killed off in the show, they were immediately looking for a new ‘penis’ to take his place. Pompeo discusses this frustrating experience to portray that even in Hollywood these unfair social constructs exist. This is the patriarchal society that we live in.
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This is a Heineken commercial that objectifies a women
by turning her body into a can of beer. This advertisement is
very obviously targeted at men’s desires by
dehumanizing this woman for their own pleasure.
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The male gaze is the male’s use of their ‘dominance’ to objectify women, creating this ‘standard’ of beauty. It is based off of this perception that women exist for the pleasure of men, but we cannot blame this on patriarchy. As a society, we are all participating in something larger than ourselves and we allow these kinds of standards and social constructs to exist. Bell Hooks contributes to this debate by describing patriarchy as “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 to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.” (p. 18). Whether it is a painting from 1570, or an advertisement in
People magazine, most images are created or portrayed with the male viewer in mind. The male gaze is pervasive in art and popular culture just as Jean Kilbourne argues in her
Killing Us Softly 3 documentary that there is a “pattern” evident in advertising about “what it means to be a woman in this culture.” The pattern evident is that being hot and sexy are the most important measures of success. Women are increasingly sexualized and rather devalued as their bodies are sexualized into objects. Art and popular culture often dehumanize women to have aesthetic qualities of beauty.
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This BMW advertisement objectifies the woman
depicted as a magazine image of a car is placed
on top of her face. This ad shows that advertisements
are targeted at men’s desires in our patriarchal society.
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My perspective on the media, the male gaze and patriarchy have all changed in various ways just since this semester has begun. While subconsciously I knew that men have a particular way at looking at women and I knew that so much is built around men’s desires in our society, I did not take into consideration how much this affects the media. I am now a lot more aware of the impact that the media overall has on both men and women. I was always someone who also always connected patriarchy to men and now I understand more clearly that patriarchy exists because we allow it to, not because men are men.
The negative consequences of this kind of society existing are that it encourages violence because of men’s brutality and women’s vulnerability. In the media, men are depicted as big, strong, and brutal while women are depicted as small, vulnerable and infantilized. This gives men this sense of dominance and makes women feel smaller than they are. Violence is in turn encouraged because of these portrayals of gender and sexuality in the media. Ads are eroticized and people become desensitized. Advertisements are designed to promote consumerism and are linking sex to products. These products are being sexualized and sex is used to sell everything; it is trivialized. Advertising is against everything considered feminine. Women consistently devalue themselves due to it and it causes men to devalue women and qualities considered “feminine” qualities. Females in general learn to sexualize themselves as objects for men’s pleasure. They are manipulated for the purpose of inducing a desire to live up to the impossible ideals established by advertising.
Works Cited
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing ; a book made by John Berger. New York: British Broadcasting
Corporation and Penguin Books.
Hooks, Bell. “Understanding Patriarchy by Bell Hooks.” Arizona, 25 July 2004,
arizona.indymedia.org/news/2004/07/20613.php.
Johnson, A. G. (2014). The Gender Knot: Unraveling our patriarchal legacy. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple Univ. Press.
Kilbourne, Jean, and Sut Jhally. Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women.
Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2000.
