In the age of social media, hundreds of millions of photos fly around the world every day and a person can take a quick excursion through social media to thousands of photos/videos in a single day. At the same time most to images are the product of the male gaze and influencing women in a silent way. The art critic John Berger once said that women’s grooming and self-expression in public space is not really up to them – “men act, women behave. Men look at women, women see themselves being looked at by men”. Filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey first coined the term “the male gaze” in her seminal 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and she wrote that “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” The male gaze, on the other hand, is always in the ascendancy of power. It is embedded in advertising, popular culture, the teachings of parents and teachers, the rules of public space, and even our own expectations of ourselves, and it influences the way we dress, behave and talk (men, women and children) all the time.
Sexual fantasy is one of the most important drivers of the male gaze. In Feminist Philosophy of Art (2008), the scholar A.W. Eaton defines the male gaze as ‘the act of objectifying women with the male gaze for sexual pleasure’. In the male gaze, the woman is often an object that lacks subjectivity, and the female body becomes the scene of the viewer’s sexual fantasies. Thus, the process of ‘gazing’ or ‘looking’ at women often turns into a process of male gratification of his sexual fantasies. In this process, the viewer not only satisfies aesthetic pleasure, but also derives sexual pleasure from it.
A breakdown of the different scenes of the male gaze reveals them in different ways. But there are two types of inherent tensions that can be said to permeate most acts of the male gaze. The first is that although the male gaze is ubiquitous, it is very often accomplished through ‘voyeurism’. Voyeurism is not necessarily a sneaky act, such as peeking at a girl’s body in the underground. Film theorist Christian Metz has made the point that voyeurism is actually an act of viewing that is predominantly imagined and supplemented by voyeurism. The second point is that although the apparent object of the male gaze is a woman, the person to whom it is ultimately directed is in fact the gaze itself. When men admire women’s appearance, not only do women’s breasts, legs and buttocks bring sexual satisfaction and then pleasure, but being in the position of the ‘gazer’ also satisfies men’s identity or masculinity and brings them pleasure.
Whether it is the process of voyeurism or self-identification, they all have one thing in common: they embody the inequality of power relations. This is why the ‘male gaze’ can be seen everywhere, and the underlying problem is precisely the inequality between men and women.
In A Women Looking at Men Looking at Women, author Siri Hustvedt says: “There are two types of female gaze, one that follows patriarchal logic, that is, the gaze of women looking at women through the glasses of the male gaze, and the other is subversive, feminist, a gaze that that dares to confront patriarchal culture and requires a great deal of self-reflection.
In contemporary society, how far can women express themselves without being swayed by the male gaze? What is the relationship between jewellery design and gender? How can jewellery design be used in reality and help young women to reduce the objectifying influence of the male gaze?
Reference：
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