The male gaze is the oppression of women and their sexuality. In "Ways of Seeing" John Berger digs deeper than what meets the eye in order to fully describe the effects the male gaze has always had on society. Through paintings, books, and other ways, women were seen as submissive, while the heterosexual men were dominant. Women’s bodies would be painted naked, but they would be positioned in a way to be enjoyed by men. The male gaze made the assumption that women were only for the sexual pleasure of the heterosexual man and nothing more. Berger was able to show these injustices towards women through his work. He says, "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (47). This means that men will look at women although they are doing something simple like walking, while women would see those men watching them. The male gaze is still true for todays society unfortunately. Women are still pictured the same ways as they were hundreds of years ago. Naked women appear in women’s magazines, while men are pictured fully clothed.
Berger states that, “Men survey women before treating them . . . how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. A woman’s worth is depicted by a man. If a man feels a woman is worthy of respect, then he will treat her with respect. If he feels she is not worthy of respect, then he will treat her otherwise”. This statement says that men will determine how they want to treat a woman based off of what he sees her as and what he thinks she represents. Opposed to treating all women with respect, men would pick and choose who they think is worth it. This is true for today’s society where men will label women as “wifey material”. This means they would consider being in a relationship with her and even marrying her. This term is extremely sexist because most of the time it is used because the women is displaying domestic duties such as cooking, cleaning, etc.
Male gaze comes from patriarchy and the ways that men continue to believe that women were created for them. Bell Hooks described 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 and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (Hooks 18). We see often times men as the breadwinners of the household, while the women are left at home to tend to the children, this is also known as gender roles. Patriarchy enforces the idea that women are to always be submissive to the man. “To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings” (Hooks 22). Young boys are taught that crying is for women, and often times this leads to those same boys growing up angry and harboring years’ worth of hurt. Any emotion other than anger is seen as soft and many man try to harbor these emotions in order to not be seen as “gay” or soft.
Works Cited
Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Washington Square Press, 2005.
Berger, John, and Michael Dibb. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series Directed by Michael Dibb. British Broadcasting Corporation, 2008.
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