On Ways of Seeing - Scott Fleisher

Katy Perry of the Cover of Cosmopolitan.
Cosmopolitan as a magazine is a leader
in media for creating "the perfect woman."

The Male Gaze is the perception that women are objects meant to be viewed for the purposes of entertaining the males in society. Women are objectified in any form of media, such as sexualization of female characters in video games, photoshopped images of women on magazine covers, the outfits women wear in films, even clothing that female news reporters wear, and the list certainly doesn’t end there. A big reason for this has to do with the social order of  patriarchy that the United States media operates under. Patriarchy is “a political-social system that insists that men are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weaker, especially women, and endowed with the right to dominate over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (Hooks 18). This has been the dominant view people have held for a long time, so it has become a natural message to receive about the social order, as children grow up to be adults.
The Oppositional Gaze is the response to the Male Gaze in that is recognizes that there’s more to gender roles than a  male viewer and a woman object. The purpose is to challenge the opinions and beliefs of those in charge. In a practical application, Hooks used it to analyze the role of black women in films after she had come to understand the “terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one’s gaze can be dangerous.” (Hooks 115).

This is an example of a typical video game female. Obviously

supposed to be a warrior of some kind,

yet wearing odd scantily-clad "armour," and is a great example of how

woman are objectified in media

For the longest time, I would say that the objectification of women was one of the dumbest aspects of this country but I had no idea why exactly it was like this. I would see in cartoons female characters wearing sweaters with a boob window and wonder why the heck it was there. I never really gave any thought to a social order like patriarchy to answer that kind of question. Now I understand that society holds women as a lower figure, and suddenly everything around me clicks into place.

Part of my issue in coming to discover this was in my open-mindedness. I’d never really thought of women to be below me (as I am a male) and perhaps I’ve been fooled into thinking that part of American culture was long gone. When I think about it, my own household runs with these same ideals and I just never noticed (nor did I ever like a lot of it). As a male, I’m expected to be able to do certain stereotypical things and I’m also to be obedient to my father, who my mom also tries to hold up as the authority of the household. But then, how many households don’t do that I wonder.

I guess that my role in this system is ignorance. I failed to notice that this was the way that the world around me has been brought up, and all I ever did was look at it with disdain and confusion, as if it didn’t really mean anything, and as if it didn’t affect me. I’ve grown to be someone who has trouble coming out and saying what I think, and I had failed to acknowledge how this system of patriarchy effected this, how it has affected me and shaped me.

Regardless, I would say that I am someone with an oppositional gaze, partly because it’s my nature to disagree with social norms most of the time, but also because I never latched onto the views my parents held, probably because I was so obedient, and remain so, that I never was really punished (for the sake of avoiding punishment) because “we were to remember that if we did not obey his rules, we would be punished” (Hooks 21) although my father almost never resorted to violence, excessive or otherwise. His weapon was words alone usually.

Works Cited

Hooks, Bell. "Feminist Manhood." The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria, 2004. 107-24. Print.   
 Hooks, Bell. "Popular Culture: Media Masculinity." The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria, 2004. 125-34. Print.
Hooks, Bell. "Understanding Patriarchy." The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria, 2004. 17-33. Print.