More than just advertisements—the male and oppositional gaze

This campaign brings awareness to the male
 gaze and how a shirt is sold differently
 for men and women.

The male gaze has been around since the time of Renaissance paintings, and only continues to prevail in the media. This idea that “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” causes women to be objects of pleasure and sight for the male surveyor (Berger, 47). The nudes of women from the Renaissance, deemed fine art, are actually illustrating the difference between a naked and a nude. “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude…Nudity is placed on display,” (Berger, 54). These paintings were not created to be a beautiful form of art; they were created to be objects for male enjoyment. To this day, the male gaze is what dominates women in media and their role as models.

Almost every advertisement in society displaying a woman is solely there as an object to sell. “Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own,” (Berger 55). These women are no longer displaying themselves, and instead are displaying the desire of the male. The women doesn’t sell the product, she becomes the product. I saw a campaign trying to raise awareness to this issue, by showing how a shirt modeled on a man and women is a totally different concept. For the man, the shirt is the accessory, while the woman is the accessory to the shirt. It’s almost funny when the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition comes out. Nowhere in sports are women wearing bikinis; women are hardly in professional sports leagues in the U.S. It is blatantly obvious that the model on the cover is there for the male gaze and the male gaze only.

The swimsuit edition of Sports
Illustrated is the most eagerly 
awaited issue of the magazine
all year.

Acknowledging the male gaze and its existence is important in understanding this larger idea of patriarchy, and how it limits gender equality. It “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…through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence,” (hooks, 18). One of those forms is through the media. I see through this understanding of the male gaze how every advertisement, every film, every news story that looks at women is portrayed submissively to men.

The media is catered all towards men and their desires, so much so that there is a word to describe when “assessing works of art specifically in relation to the interests and desires of women,” (Mulvey, 95). Gynocriticism, as it is called, is “a collective social construction of reality,” that allows women to actively have a role in the media, and show they are so much more than an object to be gazed upon. Understanding that this idea exists allows me to have a more active role in my media experience. I do not want to keep seeing images or women’s breasts thinking that this is how products should be sold. It is my role as a female to state what I “might desire as media consumers” and to question the “media constructs” of our society, (Mulvey, 98). The more women who partake in this active role towards the media, the more obvious it will seem that a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition is completely sexist and inappropriate.

The woman in this advertisement has no role in the scene
except to gaze at the male viewer and be the side object.

But although I am a female and can make these efforts to eliminate the male gaze, I can still relate to the media of women being presented, where a large amount of the population cannot. The media fails at portraying other ethnicities and people of color, and does so in such a racially stereotypical way. People, such as bell hooks, are “fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy,” and it “was the oppositional black gaze that responded,” to the male gaze constantly portrayed in the media (hooks, 117). It was a way of the public who was not represented in the media to critique and show that they were not part of this portrayal and would not accept white supremacy as being the norm. “I interrogated the work, cultivated a way to look past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language,” (hooks, 122). The oppositional gaze is a crucial theory that all members of society should use as a lens to critique the media. We, as the public should not accept the patriarchal portrayals of society in films, magazines or any sort of media.


Works Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting :, 1973. Print.

hooks, bell. "The Oppositional Gaze." Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York, NY: Routledge, 1996. Print.

hooks, bell. "Understanding Patriarchy." The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square, 2004. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Print.