John Berger The Male Gaze

“The Gaze,” also known as “The Male Gaze,” is a concept that has been prevalent in the arts for hundreds of years. Throughout history, male viewers have perceived women as taboo, pleasurable, beautiful, offensive, and sometimes all of these at once. These unfair judgments were dismissed far too often. Sometimes, the use of an “imagined spectator,” where the viewer of a piece becomes an essential part of it, draws awareness and strong responses to these issues.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger makes a striking point about how we view nudity – an artist will paint a naked woman for his own indulgence, but by adding a mirror in her hand, he can disguise its meaning as vanity. This simultaneous adoration yet disapproval of viewing the female body for pleasure has persisted in history and still today.
He further explains that in many works of art, artists romanticized women strategically to appeal to their primary audience of men. It is not uncommon for men in the paintings to be fully clothed while the women nearby wear flimsy, gossamer gowns or often nothing at all. These women are simply accessories, …show more content…
Olympia’s distant gaze implies she is looking at the viewer, who is likely male. This generated massive public outrage, many offended that the piece suggested them to be someone as lowly as a prostitute’s client. Upon discovering the reaction to this piece, I genuinely wondered why this sparked so much anger. The widespread disapproval this painting evoked does not make sense to me, considering men had been commodifying women long before Olympia. In fact, most of the time artists used female bodies mainly to appeal to male viewers. Also, while taboo, prostitution was not uncommon in this era. It seems as if men were completely okay with how they consumed women’s bodies until they were confronted about it. To a man, being confronted so brazenly by Olympia’s stare was an unthinkable