Women and Femininity in U.S. Popular Culture

Because she frequently feels on display, a woman monitors her physical appearance in mirrors, in store windows, and in the eyes and expressions of people who see her. Self-criticism originates not only in the woman herself but also from the internalized voice of male culture and the parents who teach her how to dress and present herself. John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) articulates the concepts of viewer and viewed by noting that the observer is generally male and the object observed, female. Though intended as an assessment of the subject in Western European painting, Berger's remarks apply equally to contemporary representations of women in the media: "Women watch themselves being looked at.… The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female" (p. 47).

Women internalize femininity's burden of self-monitoring along with this same male gaze as they compare themselves, usually unfavorably, with the ideal face and body that they imagine the male conjures up in his mind's eye. In her article "The Persistence of Vision," Donna Haraway rejects the power that the male gaze assumes as it "mythically inscribes all the marked [e.g., female] bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White" (quoted in Conboy, Medina, and Stanbury, p. 282). White males, the cliché goes, see a generic human being when they view themselves in the mirror; everyone else sees the markings of gender, race, or both.