Gender and the Gaze

'The gaze, whether institutional or individual, thus helps to establish relationships of power. The act of looking in commonly regarded as awarding more power to the person who is looking than to the person who is the object of the look.'
(Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, Page 111)

From reading chapter 3 of Practices of Looking, I have learnt a great deal about the gaze and how it is used and maybe misused. As the above quote indicates, being the person looking at something, rather than being displayed as object, automatically gives you a sense of power. If a person is used as raw material, solely to be looked and treated for his/her visual value, that person is striped of what makes them who they are and is subjected only in a controlled gaze.
As history of art stands, paintings were usually geared toward the male viewer, and indeed, successful painters were typically men. This may have caused women to be used for their visual value, if valued at all. I feel that having predominately male artists, means the painting or whichever image is being created, will most likely be of interest to him. This equates with the fact that the art audience was also predominantly male, meaning that if art was to be successful, it had to meed the needs of the male viewer. Heterosexual males dominated what was represented through art, without much apparent question, until the waves of feminism. These traditions in art have evolved throughout the mass media of our society, and as the creative industries, including advertising, was also typically male staff, I am now seeing a connection with past occurances and previous representations of women, and the ways in which they are presented to us now.

'Voyeurism is the pleasure one takes in looking whilst not being seen looking.' (Sterken and Cartwright, 2009, Page 134). This is a term that I also came across in Mulvey's essay. She argues that the camera acts as a mechanism for voyeurism in cinema, which again, I feel also can relate to images in the mass-media. Women are powerless in those images, as they are viewed by people she cannot see looking at her. Voyeurism gives a sense of power to the viewer, again, making the woman no more than an obect of visual value.