The male gaze or more appropriately the male gaze of the female has been a point of discontentment and education in the feminist movement and arena of gender studies. The war of the genders is one of inequality where one is in a position of power and the other has a reality that is determined by the gender in power. Presently notions of gender and feminism are wielded by the media and their projections of how to construct and perform gender. The current age is run by popular media culture and according to Watkins and Emerson “Popular media culture came under increasing attack as a particularly pernicious site if gender inequality” (2000:152). Through magazines, television and advertisements that bombard people with information all day the images all export the same message, which is that women are things to be looked at. In other words extreme emphasis has been put on the external physical quality of women.
African Gender Sociologist, Lucy Edwards-Jauch, is quoted as saying “If you want to sell a car, you drape a scantily clad woman on the bonnet” (2007). Women are portrayed as accessories that attract the mass audience into making purchases. To men they are the object to be collected; to women they are the object to be emulated. Mast et al. are quoted: “Studies found that women tended to be depicted in subordinate roles” (2000: 152). Traditional ideas of a woman’s place are construed as being inside the home or the private space and men’s roles as being in the public sphere administering the social lived experience and change. Under these kinds of social relations the woman can never be a standalone self determining character “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other” (Mast et al., 1992: 747). Such notions are reinforced through various social institutions such as religion where the Bible states during the creation of the first man and woman that “It is not good that man should be alone, I will make him a helper comparable to him” and further on “God took one of Adam’s ribs, Then the rib which He had taken from the man he made into a woman and He brought her to the man. And Adam said: She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man” (Bible NKJV, Gen:2 vs 23). Clearly the woman is set up to be less than a man in an almost infantile way because just as children come out of a mother, so the woman came out of the man. Social norms dictate that men are the head and women are the tail.
Admittedly, as a result of the various feminist movements the media has included a larger variety of ways in which women can be portrayed but behaviors are still very much associated with the different sexes. Pop Artist Christina Aguilera highlights the problem with the inequality in her song ‘Hold Us Down’: “The guy gets all the glory the more he can score, while the girl can do the same but yet you call her a whore. I don’t understand why it’s ok the guy can get away with it, the girl gets named” (Christina Aguilera: 2007). Through these lyrics the double standard of society that has endured despite the progress of ostensible equality and social change enforced through government policy is highlighted. Despite all the rights that are afforded to women there are still social pressures that stem from the cultural backgrounds pertaining to the way a woman should present herself and interact with men. It is my opinion that the various social institutions have and continue to cultivate an approval addiction mentality in women. Even though so much is happening on paper through policy etc the minds of people in society have not been emancipated from the bondage of categorizing women and men into spaces where certain things are assigned to each, never being able to intersect. These behavioral exhibitions then become cultural markers of the different sexes and get incorporated in the social construction of gender and what it means to be either of the sexes. This is also true in the reverse i.e. the behaviors could stand independently of sex and come to mean a particular gender which is what happens when for example drag queens appropriate female performance of femininity and vice versa.
Social deviance from what we are taught is attributed to the different sex’s results in conflicts both internally and externally. Seemingly men feel emasculated by women who behave the same way as they do sexually, however interestingly women are not especially threatened by men who behave like them in any way. Which is why the media and consumption are constructed in such a way as to capitalize on the male gaze which according to Watkins and Emerson “socializes women into identification and compliance with the very patriarchal values and ideologies that reproduce their marginalized status” (2000: 156). Rather than equalizing the social status quo what we see happening is women being marginalized even further by having equality added to their load of being nurturers and being responsible for continuing the human race through child baring. Instead of easing their burden women are now faced with having extremely complicated social responsibilities where they have to perform various forms of femininity depending on the role in which they find themselves. Another issue which society does not adequately address is that of the various forms of gender performance. In the case of men new categories have emerged such as the metro sexual which is defined as a straight man with style. These categories are necessary to maintain social order in that they provide people with what German Sociologist, Alfred Schurz, described as social recipes i.e. ways in which to interact with these people. This simultaneously creates a social environment which can accurately discriminate against them because of the fact that they can be categorized as not being a part of mainstream heterosexual society (subgroup) which is the social standard.
