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| Venus (Roger Michell 2007) |
Daniel Chandler in Notes on the Male Gaze writes:
- In Ways of Seeing, a highly
influential book based on a BBC television series, John Berger observed
that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being
questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47).
- Berger
argues that in European art from the Renaissance onwards women were
depicted as being ‘aware of being seen by a [male] spectator’, Berger
adds that at least from the seventeenth century, paintings of female
nudes reflected the woman’s submission to ‘the owner of both woman and
painting’. He noted that ‘almost all post-Renaissance European sexual
imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the
sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it’ . He advanced
the idea that the realistic, ‘highly tactile’ depiction of things in oil
paintings and later in colour photography (in particular where they
were portrayed as ‘within touching distance’), represented a desire to possess the things (or the lifestyle) depicted . This also applied to women depicted in this way .
- Writing
in 1972, Berger insisted that women were still ‘depicted in a different
way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male
and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’. In 1996 Jib
Fowles still felt able to insist that ‘in advertising males gaze, and
females are gazed at’ (Fowles 1996, 204). And Paul Messaris notes that
female models in ads addressed to women ‘treat the lens as a substitute
for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker,’ adding that ‘it could be
argued that when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing
themselves as a man might see them’ (Messaris 1997, 41).
