Female/Male Gaze

"Until quite recently, most collectors of art were men, and
the primary viewing audience of art was composed overwhelmingly of men" (Sturken & Cartwright, 123) Since old days, women were objectified by "male" gaze. Many painters drew a female nude in their artwork. If we go to art museum, we can find more female nudities than those of a male. In this painting, "The Storm" by a French painter, Pierre-Auguste, which you can find in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the female figure wears clothes or something but it is transparent enough that her nude is more exposed than the man.


The tendency to show woman's body as object of male gaze is still true today as we can find it in many advertisements. For example, the advertisements for alcoholic drink often feature and show women with sexy body or display female sexual parts to attract the male viewers' attention. And if you look at fashion brand like Calvin Klein and Victoria's secret, we can see that the female models are posed in downcast, passive way as objects of male gaze, not only attract female consumers by the "beauty" of the models.

However, as we saw and discussed looking at Arnold Schwarzenegger's picture, the trend has been changing and today we can fine many media images which show men as objects of female gaze. There are more and more advertisements portraying male body and those male models also pose in so passive way as female models do in the images.
In this advertisement for Armani, the image of David Beckham with masculine body in the hanging banner was unveiled as a object of gaze in the way like a strip tease.

Men are exposed to the gaze as well as women today; their body images are not only geared to opp0site-sex viewers but also the same-sex viewers too, especially in advertisements. Particularly, the industries like cosmetic and fashion, which sell products for consumer's appearance, sell the sexual images of female and male models to speak to the consumer's desire to be as perfect as them. These images influence consumers' "self images." The standardized norm of beauty by the ad images make consumers think they should also put themselves in the field of gaze having the similar perfect appearance that the models have. And these media images lead people to have false consciousness or develop an inferiority complex.