Just an interesting take. Everybody, keep reading!
" From Shakespeare to Stumble Upon, the male gaze is everywhere
I think one of the most subtle but significant ways that male privilege plays out is the male-as-default/woman-as-other attitude. When you draw a stick figure without any specific characteristics, it's assumed to be a male; you need to add a bow or a skirt to make it into the subgenre of human/male known as female. Items of equal use to both sexes - cars, food, etc., etc., etc., - are sold using half-dressed women in order to appeal to men.
I was thinking about this recently when I was reading Stephen Orgel's book Impersonations for my Shakespeare class (I actually took a different Shakespeare class from Orgel two years ago and it remains one of my favorite classes ever, but I digress). The book is about gender and Elizabethan/Jacobean theater with its central question being basically, "Why did England develop a transvestite theater, when other European countries either let women act or banned acting altogether?"
In it, he discusses common Puritan anti-theatrical tracts of the time, and how one of their biggest arguments was that when you stage a play, women can just go and see it! They can stand in the audience with men! The men might be aroused by them! There might be flirtation or even...you know. Fornication.
I was really struck by the relatively coherent concept of the male gaze (though it obviously wasn't termed as such) hundreds of years before Laura Mulvey started writing about it. Even back in the day, people thought women shouldn't leave the house lest they provoke lust by being looked at. The idea of a woman looking at a man and becoming aroused didn't seem to enter the Puritans' minds, let alone the idea of a woman wanting to go see a play for her own entertainment without factoring men into the equation. The women were not really humans with desires or agency; they were just a sort of lesser version of real humans (i.e., men) whose worth could only be determined by how it affected those real humans.
Modern advertising's use of women's bodies to sell products seems to me like much the same thing, only we're encouraging male arousal instead of discouraging it (a very slight step forward, I suppose). The imbalance between sexy, half-naked women and sexy, half-naked men in ads is obvious, as is the complete disconnect between sex and most of the products it is used to sell (really, I can think of very few things less sexy than a Carl's Jr. hamburger, I don't care how nudely Paris Hilton thrashes while eating one). And that's because, unless a product is specifically aimed toward women, advertisers don't think of women as real full humans that react to ads and buy things. People in general react to ads and buy things, and "people in general" means men. There's a reason it's the "everyman," not the "everyperson," or, heaven forfend!, the "everylady," even though women make up a bit more than half the world's population.
The cultural saturation of advertising-inspired male gaze really hit home to me when I Stumbled Upon this gallery of photos of kids in fanciful costumes doing fanciful things underwater. Most of the Stumble Upon comments thought it was real nifty, but a few said it "made me feel like a pedo," which was a bit odd seeing as how the little girls are not scantily clad or in any sexually suggestive positions. As a SU friend of mine pointed out, "The mere fact that some of you are feeling like pedos for looking at these means that you really need to realize that women≠sex. Seriously. You can look at pictures with little girls in them WITHOUT it being sexual. If this makes you feel like a pedo then maybe you might be :O"
How sad is it that some people can look at pictures of girls and just can't get past the idea that anything female exists only for the male gaze? These dudes look at pictures of girls and can't think of going swimming or having fun. Their minds jump directly to "women/girls are sexual objects rather than human beings."
It's not like I think it's a great injustice in and of itself that I don't get to see more good-looking men in ads. It's the underlying message that men are the ones who matter and women are the ones who accessorize men's thoughts and actions. I'm tired of seeing bodies like mine always used as bait and never as agents or characters. Women exist for ourselves, not for men. Men are not the only real people. "
I think one of the most subtle but significant ways that male privilege plays out is the male-as-default/woman-as-other attitude. When you draw a stick figure without any specific characteristics, it's assumed to be a male; you need to add a bow or a skirt to make it into the subgenre of human/male known as female. Items of equal use to both sexes - cars, food, etc., etc., etc., - are sold using half-dressed women in order to appeal to men.
I was thinking about this recently when I was reading Stephen Orgel's book Impersonations for my Shakespeare class (I actually took a different Shakespeare class from Orgel two years ago and it remains one of my favorite classes ever, but I digress). The book is about gender and Elizabethan/Jacobean theater with its central question being basically, "Why did England develop a transvestite theater, when other European countries either let women act or banned acting altogether?"
In it, he discusses common Puritan anti-theatrical tracts of the time, and how one of their biggest arguments was that when you stage a play, women can just go and see it! They can stand in the audience with men! The men might be aroused by them! There might be flirtation or even...you know. Fornication.
I was really struck by the relatively coherent concept of the male gaze (though it obviously wasn't termed as such) hundreds of years before Laura Mulvey started writing about it. Even back in the day, people thought women shouldn't leave the house lest they provoke lust by being looked at. The idea of a woman looking at a man and becoming aroused didn't seem to enter the Puritans' minds, let alone the idea of a woman wanting to go see a play for her own entertainment without factoring men into the equation. The women were not really humans with desires or agency; they were just a sort of lesser version of real humans (i.e., men) whose worth could only be determined by how it affected those real humans.
Modern advertising's use of women's bodies to sell products seems to me like much the same thing, only we're encouraging male arousal instead of discouraging it (a very slight step forward, I suppose). The imbalance between sexy, half-naked women and sexy, half-naked men in ads is obvious, as is the complete disconnect between sex and most of the products it is used to sell (really, I can think of very few things less sexy than a Carl's Jr. hamburger, I don't care how nudely Paris Hilton thrashes while eating one). And that's because, unless a product is specifically aimed toward women, advertisers don't think of women as real full humans that react to ads and buy things. People in general react to ads and buy things, and "people in general" means men. There's a reason it's the "everyman," not the "everyperson," or, heaven forfend!, the "everylady," even though women make up a bit more than half the world's population.
The cultural saturation of advertising-inspired male gaze really hit home to me when I Stumbled Upon this gallery of photos of kids in fanciful costumes doing fanciful things underwater. Most of the Stumble Upon comments thought it was real nifty, but a few said it "made me feel like a pedo," which was a bit odd seeing as how the little girls are not scantily clad or in any sexually suggestive positions. As a SU friend of mine pointed out, "The mere fact that some of you are feeling like pedos for looking at these means that you really need to realize that women≠sex. Seriously. You can look at pictures with little girls in them WITHOUT it being sexual. If this makes you feel like a pedo then maybe you might be :O"
How sad is it that some people can look at pictures of girls and just can't get past the idea that anything female exists only for the male gaze? These dudes look at pictures of girls and can't think of going swimming or having fun. Their minds jump directly to "women/girls are sexual objects rather than human beings."
It's not like I think it's a great injustice in and of itself that I don't get to see more good-looking men in ads. It's the underlying message that men are the ones who matter and women are the ones who accessorize men's thoughts and actions. I'm tired of seeing bodies like mine always used as bait and never as agents or characters. Women exist for ourselves, not for men. Men are not the only real people. "
