Category: Reflection and Change

After the tutorial with Sasha, I realised that I was missing out on the research for the make-up. However, Sasha thought it was still a good format, but I need to be more careful about the views of the no-makeup group and lesbians. After learning more about the literature on cosmetics, it can be seen that in some cases make-up can lead to the objectification of women as a target (Dax J. Kellie 2021). The use of cosmetics as an intervention is not desirable. It is not possible to use the act of objectifying women to study how to reduce the objectification of women.

The way I implemented it in the final intervention was changed to face painting to do it.

Reference：

1.Behind the makeup: The effects of cosmetics on women’s self-objectification, and their objectification by others(2021), Dax J. Kellie,Khandis R. Blake,Robert C. Brooks

2. Study suggests that women wearing heavier makeup are perceived as having less mental capacity and less moral status(2021), Beth Ellwood

After the tutorial with Sasha, I started to reflect on what questions I exactly wanted to work on. I continue to search for relevant sources, hoping to clarify my logic by gaining a deeper understanding. The mistake I made before was to investigate in the wrong direction and think I was narrowing the question but actually changing the question itself. Sasha argues that the study of body art has changed the whole direction of the previous question. My first objective now is to define the research question and to investigate it in depth.

I did a lot of reading, and one of the academic articles gave me some inspiration. Kelly Oliver from the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University writes in her scholarly report on Laura Mulvey’s reflections：(The use of the [male gaze] as a term can first be traced back to Laura Mulvey’s 1975 book Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. I wrote about her research in my previous blog.)

“Arguably, social media such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Tinder were invented as part of a culture that objectifies and denigrates girls and women, what we might call the culture of the male gaze. It is well known that Facebook founder and Harvard graduate Mark Zuckerberg, now one of the richest men in the world, invented the social media site Facebook to post pictures of girls for his college buddies to rate and berate women. And, Stanford graduate Evan Spiegel, inventor of Snapchat, which is estimated to be worth at least three billion dollars, sent messages during his days in a fraternity referring to women as ‘bitches’, ‘sororisluts’, to be ‘peed on’, and discussed getting girls drunk to have sex with them. The wildly popular hook-up site Tinder, with 1.6 billion ‘swipes’ and 26 million matches a day, has changed the way people ‘date’. Tinder was seeded on college campuses by former University of California students and co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen; it has generated new urban slang, ‘tinderslut’ to refer to women who use tinder to hook-up with men. Given the continued use of social media to target, harass, and humiliate young women, even documenting party rape and the sexual assault of unconscious girls, it is telling that all of these technologies were born out of the male gaze and its concomitant symptomology. Facebook and Snapchat were explicitly designed to look at and denigrate women and feed the fantasy of male control of women’s bodies.”

Laura Mulvey argues that women in film were often the object rather than the subject to be gazed at, because one of the factors controlling the camera (and the gaze) came from the assumption that the primary audience for most film genres was heterosexual men. This statement was particularly relevant at a time when Hollywood had an overwhelming number of male leads. And with advances in technology, Kelly argues that Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze is more relevant now than ever before. And in my previous research in July, I tried to narrow down the question, but in delving deeper I misdirected my research that I focused on the body and self-objectification. I forgot that the key to my initial question was the objectification and sexualisation of the female body by the outside world. Being watched leads women to construct themselves only through the gaze of others, so they use make-up, wear high heels, get breast implants and so on. To a certain extent, they lose their freedom to behave according to their own will, their sense of femininity grows diluted, they lose their own perspective and only look at themselves through a male perspective. The male gaze is the male benefit, which is supported because of the patriarchal structure of society. If women comply with the gaze, they become a “woman” in the sense that men want them to be and are “altruistic” rather than “self-interested”. The self-creativity and irreducible uniqueness of the individual is lost.

Thanks to Sasha’s reminder and advice,I can now clarify the direction of my research. I want to help women escape the influence of the male gaze on the objectification and uniformity of themselves and showcase their own individuality, talents and aptitudes. In the next step I will reconsider whether I can use jewellery design as an intervention and define my final question.

Reference：

1. The male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever
2. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema（1973) Laura Mulvey, Part of the Language, Discourse, Society book series (LDS)
3. Gender Stereotypes in Hollywood Movies and Their Evolution over Time: Insights from Network Analysi (2022) Arjun M. Kumar,Jasmine Y. Q. Goh,Tiffany H. H. Tan andCynthia S. Q. Siew, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Singapore
4. A Test of Objectification Theory: The Effect of the Male Gaze on Appearance Concerns in College Women

After discussing with Sasha, I revised my questions and added a discussion on whether fashion trends/advertising on social media affects women in the supplementary section. I hope the end result will help me to be more aware of how to help women express themselves freely.

1.Are you satisfied with your body? (in social media/fashion trends)

2. What is your relationship to your body? （Are you proud of your body or happy with it? Or maybe you feel a little disappointed with your body and can you share with us the reasons? Or do you sometimes feel that a part of your body changes as a result of your thoughts/emotions? For example, experiencing chest pains during times of stress. If you could use one word to describe your relationship with your body, what would it be? Is it enemy, friend, teacher or?）

3. Do you think you dress in a way that others will like? (Do the various outfits shared on social media, the seasonal fashion trends and other factors influence your outfit? Does the clothing hurt your body, such as fishbone corsets?)

4. What can we do to reject the objectification and sexualization of our bodies by the male gaze? (Explain to the audience the meaning of the male gaze. Is there any relevant experience you can share or ways you can imagine how to deal with it?）

5. Are we unconsciously objectifying and sexualising ourselves? (For example, weight loss or breast enlargement to keep up with fashion trends)

After my tutoring with David, I realised that I had been taking a personal approach to understanding the cyberbullying faced by people with facial disfigurement. All my sources of understanding came from academic articles or news interviews, I hadn’t really had a conversation with the facially disfigured and therefore I didn’t understand their real needs. Do they really need facial adornment to hide their scars? Do they think their scars are ugly? I may have started from a good point of view, but I hadn’t actually approached the target group to find out what they really wanted.

After this, I contacted a video site blogger Luli Scar who had a birthmark on her face. and conducted a brief interview with her. As we used text for the Q&A to protect her privacy, I have reproduced a translation of our interview Q&A below.

Q1: Can you tell us about the origin of your scars and how you feel in the daily life? (e.g. Can someone have a bad comment or attack you on social media? Will you be impacted in reality?

A1: My scars come from a fire. I think it’s inevitable that receive negative comments or attacks, my scars are very ugly and scary, I don’t deny it. In real life my main job is as a cosplayer so the scars doesn’t bother me at work, but it’s hard to avoid in daily life.

Q2: In your videos you recreate your scars through make up, do you think you are beautifying/hiding your scars in this way?

A2: NO. Just like in makeup, you choose colours that suit your skin and amplify some of your features like your eyes or mouth. My scars are the same for me as any other part of my body, I just chose my own way of doing my makeup and shared it.

Q3:Do you think you need facial adornment to beautify or cover up your scars?

A3: If I was asked to wear facial adornments, it would make me feel very offended and uncomfortable. I’m happy to show my scars on social media, it’s not my fault or guilt, it’s part of who I am. Scars caused by accidents or birth have already caused trauma in our minds and I do not want to accept the influence of the outside world again.

After this interview, I realised that the direction I had chosen was not really helping the facially disfigured and might even be harming them. Unfortunately,  this was a failed attempt. I redirected my attention to the original intention of wanting to change cyberbullying at the beginning.

The beginning about my friend’s cyberbullying stemmed from her breakup with her ex-boyfriend. Her ex-boyfriend was a minor internet celebrity and after the breakup spread rumours on social media that she was cheating on him. The boy’s fans started using this to attack my friend on social media. I wanted to change the direction of the question earlier because I did not want to cause her secondary harm because of my research.  But jumping out from that, we can see that the internet is full of such comments about women. When a woman behaves sexually in a way that is not in line with public expectations, people will always start to criticise her, whether this is true or not. All things in this category can be classified as Slut-shaming.

I was reminded that in my everyday browsing of the internet, the vocabulary of cursing in either language includes some female sexual organs. There are also specific vicious words used to abuse women. Especially with the rapid development of internet technology, a huge amount of information is rapidly transmitted to us every day from all over the world. Due to the overwhelming amount of information, it is difficult for people to take the time to understand the full extent of an event and often react extremely quickly in the moment. I wanted to change this and in my research I learned about the ethics of care. And in the article on Individual and collective moral influences on intervention in cyberbullying, the social experiments presented made me realise the power inherent in the ethics of care.

What I want to focus on now is reducing sexualisation of women in the internet and creating a caring ethical online environment. I started doing research on the idea and found a movement called Pussyhat that fits with my view as a reference.

A pussyhat is a pink, crafted hat, created in large numbers by women involved with the United States 2017 Women’s March. They are the result of the Pussyhat Project, a nationwide effort initiated by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, a screenwriter and architect located in Los Angeles, to create pink hats to be worn at the march. Donald Trump’s comments about women and “grabbing them by the pussy” have spurred many women into action and led to the creation of hand-knitted pink pussy hats.

By making Pussyhats, the organizers also look to reclaim two elements that are traditionally associated with femininity and womanhood—and derided precisely because of those reasons. “Pink is considered a very female color representing caring, compassion, and love – all qualities that have been derided as weak but are actually STRONG,” the intro continues. “Wearing pink together is a powerful statement that we are unapologetically feminine and we unapologetically stand for women’s rights.”The fact that Suh and Zweiman didn’t just ask women to go buy a pink hat and send it in was also deliberate: They wanted to celebrate knitting and crochet precisely because they’re traditionally women’s crafts—and skills passed from generation to generation: “Knitting circles are sometimes scoffed at as frivolous ‘gossiping circles,’ when really, these circles are powerful gatherings of women, a safe space to talk, a place where women support women.”

I also hope to form such communities to help women express their bodies and minds freely. This is what I will be aiming to do in my next research.

Reference:

1.Slut-shaming
2.26 English Swear Words That You Should Use Very Very Carefully
3.Ethics of care
4.Applying a ‘digital ethics of care’ philosophy to understand adolescents’ sense of responsibility on social media
5.Individual and collective moral influences on intervention in cyberbullying
6.Here’s the Powerful Story Behind the Pussyhats at the Women’s March
7.Pussyhat
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/pink-pussyhats-will-be-making-statement-womens-march-washington-1601088