Essay

 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER IDENTITY AND THE ROLES GENDER AND POWER PLAY WITHIN SOCIETY

  The idea of femininity is developed through self-concept and socialization. At childhood, we are exposed to activities that naturalize gender-specific roles and force us to see these activities as part of our own identity. As we grow up we also relate our own sense of self to real-life role models, which today, come mainly from television, advertisements and films.

  As a child, gender plays a huge role in how we evolve our own identities. Gender evolves our social behaviour patterns, how we relate experiences and what we are to expect from our lives. Psychological theories claim that we have acquired our gender identity when we reach adulthood but many feminist psychologists, for example Rohrbaugh, in her book ‘Women: Psychology’s puzzle’ (1981), assert that biological determinism (the argument that femininity and masculinity follow inevitably from our physical differences as males and females) devalues women’s abilities while promoting antisocial male behaviour.

  She goes on to point out that rapists can be seen as ‘naturally requiring sexual release’ and women have ‘natural manual dexterity’ which makes them good at sewing but not at surgery.

Psychological analysis of gender focuses strongly on early development but theorists such as Lynda Birke (1986) argue that other social and biological factors (for example menstruation, child-birth and menopause) influence women’s sense of femininity and identity and so should not be overlooked.

  Another influence in gender acquisition is the role played by gender stereotypes. In Myra McDonald’s work ‘Representing Women’, she writes that the stereotype is used to ‘critisize the reduction of the three-dimensional quality of the real to a one-dimensional and distorted form’. She goes on to claim that if the group being stereotyped is already in a disadvantaged position, ‘the stereotype intensifies the offence. From bra-burning feminists to house-proud housewives, from sex-crazed seductresses to neurotic career-women, the media regularly serve a menu of female stereotypes that stimulates misogynistic taste buds’.

  However, as Tessa Perkins points out (‘Rethinking Stereotypes’, 1979), stereotypes manage to survive because they contain a ‘kernel of truth’. They convince us that they are not entirely false and so continue to work as they are deemed to be plausible and thereby ‘mask their own value-system’. Perkins follows this point by saying that stereotypes of men, e.g ‘macho man’, which cause negative emotions ‘do little to dent male authority’.

  In advertising, language and power can come into play in terms of gender roles. I have picked the Gillette advertising slogan of ‘the best a man can get’ as an example (Image 1). This slogan promotes the idea that the best a man can get is of quality and excellence. If you change the ‘man’ to ‘woman’, as in ‘the best a woman can get’, the implications of the sentence immediately change. The ‘best’ a woman can get is not of the same quality of excellence as the man’s and suggests a second-best, almost cheap, product. This shows how the language used can link in all kinds of issues relating to each gender’s power and how society processes the relationship between the two.  Our hierarchical society means that the difference between masculinity and femininity is, as Carole Pateman describes, ‘the political difference between freedom and subjection’ (‘The Sexual Contract’, 1988, p.207). Men tend to dominate high positions in the work place and although this is slowly changing, women are still seen as being a minority in places like the clergy and in politics.

  The 1485 painting ‘Vanity’ (Image 2) by Hans Memling is about the male fantasy of his control over women. The placement of the mirror is so that you can see the woman’s face, as she is not looking directly out of the painting at the viewer. The mirror works as a device, the woman cannot get away from the representation of herself in it. Berger writes: “The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.”

  ‘Monuments and Maidens’ (1987) by Marina Warner backs this idea by writing, that ‘Men often appear as themselves, as individuals, but women attest the identity and value of someone or something else… Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is’ (p. 331)

  In a recent article by Metro News Reporter in 2011, H&M are criticised for using real model’s heads on computer-generated bodies on its online store.

This unachievable body image has been used by the store to showcase lingerie and swimwear (Image 3). The article quotes the chief executive of Beat (the eating disorder charity) Susan Ringwood as saying ‘We understand why you need a mannequin to stand in a shop window, but not when you could have a real living body instead’. H&M’s Hacan Andersson said that it was ‘regrettable if they had led anyone to believe the virtual mannequins were real bodies, and that it wasn’t their intention.’ This article makes you wonder if society really is afraid of a ‘real’ woman if stores are creating their own computer generated women in order to sell clothes. Although the pose of the woman has changed since Memling’s Vanity, the woman is now direct and forceful in her stance, if it is not an actual woman standing there, the power of the image is completely lost.

  The models in these photos are viewed as Berger describes in his book, ‘Ways of Seeing’. They are fashion’s one-dimensional women whose purpose is to sell clothes by letting their audience objectify them unchallenged. Their gaze is direct but their nakedness is not defiant but sexual. She is posed to impress her audience and her clothes dictate how they perceive her. Berger mentions this by stating that the female model, ‘unlike the male subject, often posed with the trappings of activity (such as dog, horse or gun), offers few clues about her situation. Only her dress allows us to place her within the class system as lady or servant.’

  One of fashion photography’s stereotypes is to show women as being mysterious and an enigma. They deliberately use nonspecific settings and deprive the models of individual personality features. The endless rows of coy posing, averted gaze and the total lack of any facial expression denies the women the ability to access her own identity.

  In John Berger’s book, ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972) he explores how oil paintings still offer up the templates of the poses being used today in fashion photograph, pornography and print advertisements. He claims that ‘the decontextualized woman, engaged in no activity other than narcissistic self-contemplation, evokes our interest in narrative speculation.’

  The theorist Laura Mulvey in a 1981 article states that ‘the spectator (of films) is not necessarily male, but masculine, and adopts a masculine subjectivity or subject position when viewing a film’. Her work focuses on the spectator who, in Mulvey’s opinion, swings between ‘the Freudian process of voyeuristic and erotic gazing from a safe distance and the close identification with the characters on the screen that reactivates the Lacanian mirror phase’. She goes on to state that a child’s pleasure at recognising themselves in a mirror image draws the spectator into the voyeuristic gaze as it is something they identify with from an early stage of their development.

  Jonathan Schroeder notes on the subject that, 'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (p. 208).  This opinion has been challenged through the works of Steve Neale and Richard Dyer (1982) who argue that the male is not always the ‘looker in control of the gaze’. They point out that since the 1980s, mainstream cinema has increasingly sexualised the male body.

  Mulvey’s argument goes on to claim that conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition ‘not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator.’ She writes, ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’. Mulvey also looked at traditional films, where men are presented as active, controlling subjects who treat women as objects of desire without looking at the woman’s own identity. She writes that ‘such films objectify women in relation to the ‘controlling male gaze’ presenting ‘woman as image’ and man as ‘bearer of the look’.

  In Griselda Pollock’s 1988 ‘Vision and Difference’ she adopts a feminist perspective on the nineteenth-century artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She notes how his female models have a generally blank expression, an emotionless subject, which the painter can mould to his own fantasies and projections of femininity. Rossetti’s sister, Christina, in her poem ‘In the Artist’s Studio’ exposes her brother’s paintings as representing the woman ‘not as she is, but as she fills his dream’. The idea of an artist ‘feeding’ upon the face of his female model is Christina’s reference to male desire for a woman who is no longer herself but an aesthetic object. This blank, emotionless face can be seen on Rossetti’s 1864 painting, ‘Venus Verticordia’ (Image 4).

  This objectification is seen today, an example of which is the 2011 article by Anna North titled, ‘Can you tell the difference between a men’s magazine and a rapist?’. The article looks into how a new study has found that people cannot tell the difference between quotes from British ‘lad mags’ and interviews with convicted rapists. The unsettling parts of the article go on to say that the participants in the survey identified more with the rapists’ quotes, some of which talk about coercing women or having sex with them even though they were initially unwilling. Dr. Peter Hegarty co-author in the study said that ‘There is a fundamental concern that the context of such magazines normalises the treatment of women as sexual objects…are teenage boys and young men best prepared for fulfilling love and sex when they normalise views about women that are disturbingly close to those mirrored in the language of sexual offenders?’

  One of the quotes from a ‘lad’s mag’ which was particularly disturbing was ‘A girl may like anal sex because it makes her feel incredibly naughty and she likes feeling like a dirty slut. If this is the case, you can try all sorts of humiliating acts to help live out her filthy fantasy’. A quote from an interviewed rapist was ‘You’ll find most girls will be reluctant about going to bed with somebody or crawling in the back seat of a car…but you can usually seduce them, and they’ll do it willingly.’ Between the rapists’ words and quotes from the lad’s mag, the similarities are striking. Both objectify women in the basest of forms and it is incredible to believe that this kind of language is being used about women in our ‘equal’ society.

  In ‘Ways of Seeing’, Berger writes that the principal protagonist is never painted in the average European oil painting and this can be related to advertisements too. He says that the protagonist is ‘the spectator is in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man’.  The advert by Gucci (Image 5) illustrates his point that ‘if the woman has her lover in the painting also, her attention is rarely directed at him because her ‘true’ lover is the assumed male viewer. The woman portrayed belongs to the owner of the image/painting and she is designed for him.

  This view that women are ‘designed’ for a male audience is not an idea which has disappeared in our equal rights society and with the arrival of touch-up make up, Photoshop and airbrushing it seems like it will never leave. If you pick up any magazine today you are still seeing what Berger describes as ‘the objectifying male gaze’ and this is used everywhere to sell products to society. This is unlikely to change as it is so set in advertising and obviously successful for marketing.
  Throughout art history women have been the subject for the male gaze and their presence in a stately home was a sign of wealth and power. Their nakedness was a submission of their sex and a sign of ownership. The poses they used are used today in advertising and are still showing a woman who is totally controlled by her audience's opinion. The stereotypes still exist for men and women but society still normalises the view that women are subjects to be looked down upon and objectified by the dominant male gaze.

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