It’s Not the Same for Women

Culture is a moving target, and those of us that talk about it have to get used to eventually becoming more or less “outmoded.” Sometimes, one’s own ideas culturally deconstruct themselves; ironically, if they catch on they can become daily fare for the next generation, and stale bread to the one after. This can be frustrating to the writer’s ego, but it’s in the nature of the game.

It’s pretty clear that cultural criticism that is aimed at concrete, historically located developments or things — e.g. the male body in contemporary advertisements, current political discourse, students’ addiction to electronic communication, to shout out a few examples — is time-sensitive. But ideas that present themselves through the lofty language of “theory” — purporting to offer a framework for understanding that is broadly applicable across time and context (e.g. how to read texts, the meaning of “the gaze,” or Laura Mulvey’s “the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form”) — are operating by impossible standards of applicability. For there are multiple ways to read texts, the meaning of “the gaze” varies by culture, gender, race, sexuality, etc., and the notion that patriarchal society structures images or narratives according to the laws of psychoanalysis ignores (among other things) that consumer culture bends to no processes other than those of the market. When the eroticization of the male body became big business thanks to the genius of Calvin Klein and other designers, the landscape of mainstream images stopped following John Berger’s formula (1972) that “men act and women appear.”

The Male Gaze in Retrospect

In 1975, Laura Mulvey brought a new perspective to cinema studies. Susan Bordo, Jack Halberstam, Toby Miller, Sharon Marcus, and Mulvey herself consider its impact. Read their essays.

Or did it? That’s exactly the kind of question that Berger and Mulvey force us to ask. Re-reading Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in the year 2015, I can barely force myself to wade through the Lacanian theory, and as someone who has written extensively about the depiction of male and female bodies, the notion that “a male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are not … those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of [a] more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego” seems obsolete to me.

But perhaps it’s not as clear-cut as that. In the years between The Full Monty and Magic Mike, the naked male body has become less a revelation of the vulnerability of the gazed-upon man and more a demonstration of muscled, phallic command over the attention of the spectator. Perhaps “erotic object” and “perfect, powerful ego ideal” are not so mutually exclusive in a culture in which we wear our egos on our perfectly toned bodies.

I assign Mulvey in my classes to raise such issues, and for another reason, too. Her essay (along with Berger’s much more reader-friendly Ways of Seeing, and E. Ann Kaplan’s 1983 “Is the Gaze Male?”) is a key example of that exciting cultural moment when theories of “the look” of others — first espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre, whose phenomenology of le regard is lacking any gendered, racial, or cultural dimension — were subjected to that explosive, fabulously generating insight: It’s not the same for men and women.

I go back even earlier, too. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, implicitly criticized Sartre’s argument that the look of the other, in encroaching on the freedom of the self, is “hell.” For women, she argued, being looked at may have a profoundly different meaning — affirming when it is full of admiration, and threatening not when it is active and “defining” (as for Sartre) but when it ignores, is oblivious. Women of my baby-boomer generation know exactly what she means.

Nowadays “intersectionality” is all the rage, and we sometimes forget that without the first cuts into the undifferentiated Subject, there would be no “sections” to re-theorize. Mulvey and other gender-centered theorists offered the first critiques of the abstract (but covertly male) “human” that philosophers such as Sartre had assumed in analyzing the meaning of the Look of the Other. As such, they opened the door to further challenges — for example, coming from race studies and disability studies, which have produced powerful accounts of what it feels like to move through the social world marked by one’s skin color or one’s wheelchair, and from lesbian film studies (and female directors) who have offered a whole new vocabulary of variations, visual as well as intellectual, on the female gaze.

I assign Mulvey because I look at her “theory” the same way I look at cultural criticism — that is, in historical context. Much of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is frustratingly opaque and jargon-clogged — hardly unusual in poststructuralist theorizing — and many of the generalizations no longer pack the punch that they did in 1975. But the piece remains among the most generative works of an era that forced us to see that gender matters.

Susan Bordo is a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky and the author of, among other books, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).