Lenses of Perception

The male gaze is “the” perspective of mainstream society. We look at media with an ego-centric male dominated gaze. The main issue with this point of view is the objectification of women. The reason why the male gaze is a pervasive form of vision is because the way we perceive things indefinitely shapes our definitions of them, In this case women. Women in the media are objectified as objects of our (male) attention. They are produced in media for the sole purpose of inflating the male ego and strengthening the structures the bind them. But the interesting part the woman plays in this cycle is that she knows she’s being looked at as an object of male desire. The male gaze is essentially a lens that is gendered around male power and control. This lens also serves as a tool to enforce these presumptions of society. Bell hooks combated these pervasive perceptions with a lens of her own which she calls the oppositional gaze. Hook’s oppositional gaze is a lens that is completely opposite of the male gaze in every way. Her gaze is of an African American female. Hook's gaze allows her to combat the male gaze by giving power to women by looking back critically. As hook’s states “there is power in looking”. What she means is that women can look back and breakdown the misrepresentations of themselves if they look back and respond. The power lies within each woman to see the media in which they are presented and to acknowledge o the image is false and a stereotype of what men want to see. John Berger’s book “The Ways of Seeing” introduced the topic of a falsified female image. This is valuable to us all because we want to make sure that the images we see do not affect our perceptions of reality. We need to be certain that what we are thinking is our thoughts and not subliminal messages from fraudulent media. It’s important to understand the lens in which you view the world.