“Humans are obsessed with the naked body. Centuries of art, decades of film, and today’s omnipresent digital media provide ample evidence of this collective fixation. And, while many instances of nudity are celebratory, it’s also a fact that this kind of imagery goes hand-in-hand with issues around objectification – particularly of women – harmful beauty standards, and a lack of representation of marginalized groups.”
(Orla Brennan. “This Exhibition Celebrates the Naked Body Through a Female Lens.” AnOther. https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13848/this-new-york-show-is-celebrating-the-nude-through-a-female-lens. February 01, 2022.)
The “male gaze” describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women. While biologically, from early adolescence on, we are driven to look at and evaluate each other as potential mates, the male gaze twists this natural urge, turning the women into passive items to possess and use as props.
(K. Oliver. “The male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever.” New Review of Film and Television Studies. 2017.)
This concept is not just about how women (and their bodies) are used to satisfy male fantasy but also how this gaze, whether it's directed at them or others, makes women feel about themselves.
(E. Glapka. “'If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then that’s a problem' – women in the center of the male gaze. Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis as a tool of critique.” Critical Discourse Studies. 2017.)
The male gaze has reached beyond the silver (or iPhone) screen to encompass how the female sex is portrayed and viewed in any context, from being catcalled while walking down the street to being dismissed as gold-diggers or for having "hissy-fits." By extension, simply worrying about your appearance, relative attractiveness, seeming "too smart," or how you will be "seen" can also fall under the guise of living under the male gaze.
(Sarah Vanbuskirk. “What Is the Male Gaze?” https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-male-gaze-5118422. September 11, 2021.)
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
– Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Art And the Male Gaze
“In the hierarchy of art history virtue, ‘nude’ has been ranked above ‘naked.' The former alludes to autonomy, respectability and objective study, devoid of crude sexuality. Naked, conversely, suggests unwillful exposure, scrutiny and shame. This is a rapidly eroding distinction that began when fearless feminist artists revolted in the mid-20th century. In contemporary art, nudity – a term so potently linked to a male gaze on women – appears to have lost its lustre, while nakedness is synonymous with truth and authenticity.”
– Harriet Lloyd-Smith, arts editor for Wallpaper
The relevance of the male gaze in art history became apparent in the 1970s. For art history specifically, the idea of the male gaze is referencing the desire of men to create idealized images of women for their enjoyment. Also, this does not mean a strictly sexual enjoyment, the male gaze is the idea that male artists, and female artists as well, painted for a male audience, so they wanted to show scenes and situations that would capture the attention of the audience.
Édouard Manet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863, oil on canvas, 208x 264.5cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. This impressionist painting by Manet is showing a picnic, but there is something off about some of the sitters. The men are fully clothed but the women are completely nude. This too almost seems like the personification of the male gaze.
As you likely suspect, this practice happened as early as the Renaissance, when the only people who had money were men, so it would make sense that artists would paint works that would appeal to their targeted market. So, the male gaze grew and encompassed many aspects of art.
(Rebecca McInerney. “The Male Gaze.” Art History Perspectives. April 02, 2021.)
Pervasive portrayals that bend to the male gaze show women as passive, vapid, highly sexualized, or other stereotypical versions of womanhood. They function secondarily to the primary male characters and/or focus their attention on pleasing these men or competing with and besting other women to get the desired male affection (or lust).
(Sarah Vanbuskirk. “What Is the Male Gaze?” https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-male-gaze-5118422. September 11, 2021.)
Additionally, the male gaze is an added burden for people in traditionally marginalized groups. For example, Black women have historically been depicted as being hypersexual by the male gaze, which adds another facet of stereotype to the pervasive racism they face.
Viki Kollerova, Where I Grow (2019-2020) From "Nude" Exhibit
Exhibit
Offering a fresh new perspective on the nude, a new exhibition opening at Fotografiska New York – “Nude” – investigates the body through the lens of 30 female-identifying artists from around the world, each of who have photographed the body in beautiful, disruptive, and experimental ways.
Exploring ideas of the nude as both an “idealized form,” as well as more honest and personal artistic expressions of the subject, the exhibition’s 200 works celebrate a wealth of identities and perspectives on nakedness.
The works offer new perspectives on the naked form as a symbol of beauty, self-expression, identity, eroticism or politics – and not just the slender female forms over-represented in media, but a range of cis, non-binary and trans figures of all skin tones and body types. In "Nude" the body isn't just an object of desire, but a vessel for strength, wisdom and intimacy; a marker of transition; and a site of history and violence.
"Studio Practice #6" (2017) Julia SH From "Nude" Exhibit. Courtesy of the Artist and Fotografiska
Overall, the women represent 20 nationalities, with their ages ranging from mid-20s to mid-50s. Among the artists featured are Dana Scruggs, who has explored the Black male body; Japanese artist Momo Okabe, whose raw imagery documents trans and non-binary individuals; artist Luo Yang, who has spent her career capturing underground youth culture in China; and Lina Scheynius, who has turned the camera on herself.
Co-curator Johan Vikner says …
“Unlike painting, photography is not a medium that has been ‘owned’ by men for centuries. In art, we have mostly been presented with the same kind of nude through our modern western history. A consideration most often decided and depicted by men, for an audience of men. This collection of contemporary female artists using the nude body as their language, be it their own or others, for the sake of art, beauty, representation, self-expression, as a subject and object, is an example of what this new nude is and what it looks like.”
(Orla Brennan. “This Exhibition Celebrates the Naked Body Through a Female Lens.” AnOther. https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13848/this-new-york-show-is-celebrating-the-nude-through-a-female-lens. February 01, 2022.)
From I Sing the Body Electric
Walt Whitman - 1819-1892
This is the female
form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It
attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its
breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside
but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and
solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are
now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it,
the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of
legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb
stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and
deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and
enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious
nice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the
prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost
in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.
This the nucleus—after
the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,
This the bath of
birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.
Be not ashamed women,
your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You
are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.
The female contains all
qualities and tempers them,
She is in her place and moves with
perfect balance,
She is all things duly veil’d, she is both
passive and active,
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons,
and sons as well as daughters.
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