The male gaze is a concept which has been so societally and culturally ingrained – more prominently in western society – that many people are still unfamiliar with its definition, and more importantly, it’s impact on the way we navigate life in the post-truth, digital age we currently live in. Laura Mulvey discussed the concept prominently in her writings around feminist film theory, and first coined the term in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
To put it plainly, the male gaze is the way in which women are presented – in film, art, the media, literature etc. – from a male, heterosexual view, which positions them as sexual objects, placed for the visual pleasure of the man alone. Despite the Male Gaze being originally identified and challenged nearly 40 years ago, we are, culturally, still trying to drag ourselves out of the deep dark pit of socially acceptable sexism, stemming from the male gaze, which is embedded into our culture.
I feel that the key component in how the male gaze still grips our societal perceptions – and hence why I am interested in it conceptually – is the sexualisation of the female form: the way in which any glimpse of female flesh, a suggestion of a breast or the mention of a woman’s thigh is instantly a sexual thing! Compared to the male form – to which we blink no eye at an exposed nipple or hip-skimming running short – the female figure has, and continues to be a logo for sex, objectification and visual pleasure (scopophillia). Mulvey writes:
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” (2009: 9)
As you will see from my title, I do not believe that the male gaze and its implications extend only to the modern day heterosexual, cis-gendered, man. I believe that due to the depth of inception that this notion has secured within our culture and the way we are taught to view the respective genders, has led to women aligning their own views – subconsciously – with the male gaze. This can be seen in numerous industries and social spheres, from female perfume adverts featuring barely clothed women, to female ‘health’ magazines focusing on weight loss and youthful looks rather than muscle growth or internal health (as male magazines tend to). Although clothing, fitness and social media industries have – in recent times – been seen to be advancing away from anarchic body stereotypes to include more diverse models, more inclusive clothing ranges and emphasis on health over aesthetic, there is still a socially ingrained belief that female worth is centred around appearance and being viewed as an object for male visual enjoyment. This notion of female social currency being supported by an individual’s visual sexual desire, as defined by heterosexual male preference, means that the focus on the female body and is nearly always positioned sexually, either because it is intended in such a way and accepted because of our socially embedded misogyny, or because the audience sexualises the image with their perception of it or comments upon it – just think of female athletes being criticised for looking ‘manly’ and you see what I mean.
In my painting, I want to remove this subconscious notion that bodies – in particular, female bodies – are not mere sexual objects; breasts to be drooled over, legs to wolf-whistle at, bum to be slapped and something to f***. (‘Scuse my French). By cropping and abstracting an image of a body, I hope that viewers will disconnect their preconceived ideas on figure, form and function and focus instead of the shapes created, the vibrancy of colour and the challenge of recognisability which comes with an abstract work. I must stress at this point, that my paintings are not exclusively women, because I do not believe that problems of objectification, sexualisation and body confidence are only female concerns. The majority of my works do use female figures as subjects, however this is as much due to availability of imagery/willing participants as it is with my personal focus and conceptual thinking – which in itself illustrates again how women have unintentionally integrated the male gaze into their own thinking, making women more likely to take and share images of themselves and their bodies than men are.
This focus on female beauty and sexualisation has led to the development of other socio-cultural concepts that impact the daily lives of contemporary women, one of the most prominent being the beauty myth, which Naomi Wolf defines as “a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement” (1990: 10). The beauty myth enforces within society the notion that women mustwant to be desirable and visually attractive, and men mustwant to obtain women who have these attributes, all of which echoes the ideology of the male gaze and imposes a belief system within western society that is obsessed with the aesthetic of the female body and face. If we – as a species – do not address the multitude of problems that arise from the prevalence of the beauty myth and the male gaze, we will only dig ourselves deeper into a discriminatory and superficial societal grave. And just as with the male gaze, all genders must take responsibility for the implications of our culturally engrained behaviours which reinforce these notions. By situating my paintings outside of the realms of figurative art and attempting not to influence the viewer through titling or referencing the source image, I intend to encourage a new way of looking at women, bodies, and the world we live in:
“the contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.” (Wolf, 1990: 19)
References/Recommended reading:
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. 1st ed. Penguin Books Ltd.
Curtis, S. (2018) Feminists don’t wear pink (and other lies). Penguin Books Ltd.
Mulvey, L. (2009) Visual and other pleasures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (Language, Discourse, Society).
Power, N. (2009). One-dimensional woman. Winchester, UK: 0 [Zero] Books.
Wolf, N. (1990) Beauty myth. London: Vintage.