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| Cartoon exemplifying what society deems acceptable and unacceptable |
There are moments in time where being a woman and taking care of yourself that somehow correlate with shame and embarrassment -- embarrassment of a new menstrual cycle, taking a birth control pill at the dinner table with family, breastfeeding in public. Basic female necessities that keep women healthy that the male gaze umbrellas, almost always the body, are somehow deemed as inappropriate and unacceptable. The female orgasm in film is rarely seen, as that too, is unacceptable. Patriarchy is the idea of, "To be born a woman has to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men" (Berger 46) Women are for gazing, women are for having, but women cannot be for themselves.
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| Jennie Finch, renowned softball player, plays "cutesy" in a mini skirt and wiffle bat yet her male counterpart from the MLB lands an action shot on Sports Illustrated. |
This type of sexualization of women can be traced back for centuries but the fascination of the female body has yet to have ceased, for all the wrong reasons. In media, women are most often objects. As a woman, and especially a woman of color, it can be easier to actively avoid and distance yourself from that objectification by taking on the "oppositional gaze". "...I had developed the oppositional gaze. Not only would I be hurt by the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating representation, I interrogated the work" (hooks 122) hooks describes the movie going experience for a black woman as a sense of invisibility and frustration, to not have to the ability to identify with what she knows -- but without "mammy" trope. The gaze, the stare, has been a part of the black experience for centuries, "By courageously looking, we defiantly declare: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." (hooks 116) That defiance and courage is how I imagine the patriarchy to change. By fighting the norm, the pa
In "Oppositional Gaze", bell hooks has once again proven that intersectional feminism is the only type of feminism that should be in existence in today's culture. When there is inequality, struggle, and hardship, each member of those parties should rise together to defeat it -- not compartmentalize based on gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. As Mulvey points out from A Question of Silence, "Perhaps the final horror for a male viewer of A Question of Silence is the textual prelude to murder: when all three women share a gaze they are empowered to kill" (Mulvey 109) In my experiences with white male privilege, the root is fear of loss of power. Sojourner Truth realized as far back as 1851 in her feminist speech, Ain't I A Woman?, "I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon." The deeply rooted fear of the collapse of patriarchy and the fear of being treated as women and people of color is what needs to change in society today.
Equality, at its core, is inclusion. It's the idea of sharing experiences with equal weight and gravity. hooks, in my experiences correctly, notes that, "Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation...Men who have heard and know the world usually associate with women's liberation, with feminism" (17 hooks) The understanding of patriarchy needs to be more apparent in everyday culture. It is just as damaging to men to live up to unrealistically stable expectations as it is for a woman to be unrealistically perfect object.
(Kerry Washington's reading of
"Aint I A Woman?" by Sojourner Truth) Works Cited:
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting :, 1973. Print.
hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square, 2004. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. 2nd ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
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