From the Nicki Minaj vidoes I watched this week to the articles in Cosmopolitan that I read, the question of whether or not women really are objectified came into my mind. Are we just objects that serve to satisfy men’s’ desires or are we empowering ourselves and making ourselves the subject? The more and more I thought about this question, the more I realized that even when we do think we are the subjects and are in fact partaking in certain activities, we are in that moment more of an object than ever because at the end of the day we are doing it to please the man’s glare more than anything. An example of this is in the Anaconda music video by Nicki Minaj where the gives Drake a lap dance. In that moment, it might see as if Minaj is trying to please her own sexual desires but in fact she can only do so by being aware of her body in relation to the man’s- Drake in this case. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger makes the argument that “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. A woman must continually watch herself….She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success for her life.” Berger’s bold statements tie in directly to the entertainment industry’s mantra that sex sells. This notion of being sexual in order to sell copies of whatever it is that is being produced reiterates that for the woman, she must present herself in such a way that will be pleasing for her male counterparts while at the same time being completely aware of the fact that she is doing so. How then can we make the argument that being nude we are empowering ourselves and shifting from the object into the subject when we are still working within the boundaries that the male gaze has provided for us. To become the object, to truly empower ourselves, we must figuratively move from in front of the camera to behind the camera but to do so would be close to impossible. Why? Because our perspectives of one another have been socially constructed to make this form of thinking and seeing the norm and until the norms are broken- which would again be almost impossible because it is so far engrained into our minds- we must stop lying to ourselves and saying models posing in Playboy and artists making hyper sexualized videos are in fact empowering themselves.
The notion of the panopticon is an interesting one in the sense that its structure alone has very impactful effects. The way the panopticon is set up is in such a way where the prisoners around the tower feel as though they are being watched at all times- the figure in the tower is able to see into the cell but the prisoners can’t see out of the cell. This whole concept of correcting ourselves based on what we can see or in this case we are unable to see is an interesting one. In most of my classes there is a video camera where we are not only being recorded at all times but we are also being surveillance. What I find interesting about this is that the fact that we have no idea whether or not we are actually being watched, and the fact that what we can see is hindered to a degree, causes us to abide by all the “proper rules.” The person in the tower just like the person behind the camera is privileged.
With what we can and can’t see we are able to produce different narratives and it is those narratives that result in us acting one way or another. Our actions are ultimately a result of the visuals that we have been presented as a child as well as the ones we have been able to produce with mere vision. The truth of the matter is, if we didn’t feel as those we were being watched at all times, the burden of responsibility would be lifted off of our shoulders and we would be able to act as freely as we want; the mere thought of an authority figure causes us to correct ourselves and if god forbid that were to fail, society has implemented another form of correction inducing agents in the form of our peers and friends. This brings me to the concept of power knowledge. We’ve all heard the notion that with knowledge comes power and if that is true is the statement that to see means to know or is a particular way of seeing more important than another? These questions don’t have simple answers and at times don’t even have one answer but what I have been able to conclude from asking myself these is that both the panopticon and the cameras in our classrooms prove one thing and that is that it doesn’t really matter who is behind the camera, what does matter however is the power structure that is in place where one party is in a place of power over the other. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2015
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