I started a subject this week called The Image.
In our first lecture, we were asked to read John Berger's Ways of Seeing, focusing on the section on the depiction of the female nude throughout art history. We were also asked to bring in an image that somehow reflected on a point from the reading. The first thing I thought of was the painting above, the Luncheon on the Grass, by Manet.
It's always struck me as a slightly unsettling image (despite being a beautiful painting): the woman completely naked while the men sit by her, fully dressed. It is not a depiction of a woman simply being, but a woman completely aware of the spectator's eyes on her, both within the painting and outside of it.
Berger makes an interesting point that for the most part, throughout history, the image of the female nude almost always implies passivity, inaction, availability and awareness of the male gaze. He describes in the documentary (with his awesome lilting British accent) how traditional Western depictions of women, from the middle ages and on towards modernity (when things started to loosen a little), are typically shown lying down, in varying poses of total submission to the spectator: the spectator who, through looking, becomes the owner of the nude 'object'.
I'm in no way well-read in art theory or even feminism, nor can I pretend to have an informed opinion on subjects like this, but learning about Berger's ideas really resonated with me. And I think it's because I'm starting to believe that although all the visual elements of such imagery has changed dramatically (ie photographs instead of paintings, or thin 'heroin chic' instead of voluptuous renaissance figures) it's not difficult at all to see this kind of unrecognised voyeurism implicit in the images of women that saturate advertising today.
As a case in point, on a trip to the dentist earlier in the week, my boyfriend and I were flicking through one of the trashy gossip magazines that seem to breed in great numbers in medical waiting rooms. We noticed that every single image (bar two) showed a woman with her mouth seductively open. It was something neither of us had ever consciously noticed and yet here it was, overwhelmingly, in the majority of pictures. I'm not even sure what this means (if it means anything at all) but it was, much like the painting, slightly unsettling.
As somehow who tries (this being the operative word) not to care excessively about how I look, I sometimes feel swamped with a feeling of complete inadequacy when faced with the thousands of images of virtually unachievable (shy of cosmetic surgery) standards of "how women should look". It's not something I want to waste time worrying about, and yet it seems to be such a strong message in so many forms of advertising and media. For me at least, it leaves this pervasive self-consciousness over some interactions, that I think ultimately makes it harder to connect with people in a true sense.
I know that all this is by no means a clear-cut issue, and that there are definitely other ways of looking at the way women are represented (some see it as power) but like anything that becomes accepted and unquestioned, it's valuable to try and look at it with new eyes.
At the end of Berger's documentary he speaks with a group of women about the topic, and one woman in particular seemed to best sum up the effect that these images have on the collective female consciousness:
"I have never consciously looked at myself in the mirror and seen myself as I actually am. I always see the image that I want. You think "the female body is beautiful-I'm a beautiful object." And if not, "I have to do something about it". The painful part of the whole thing is the feeling of inadequacy."
To me this is the crux of the problem with images of women that assume the male spectator: it teaches us to look at ourselves as objects, as sights. To see ourselves as "nude" and watched, as opposed to naked and real.
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