Dear Friend and Reader:
Before I get into the astrology (in the next post, above), which is mainly about the Sun in Taurus, I would like to share some reflections on this weekend’s conversation about the blue dress photo. First, thank you for participating — and for continuing to add your ideas.
As someone pointed out in an email, the whole conversation reveals the power of an image. I spent a lot of the weekend sifting through a feminist theory called the Male Gaze. This mainly involves a theory of cinema. I am sure that for scholars of this theory I’m going to oversimplify things, but I’ll give it a go from my nascent perspective.
The theory involves taking apart how men tend to see women, and how men depict women in images. It’s an attempt to deconstruct the power dynamics between men and women, in which women generally come out on the losing end of the equation (despite much mutual damage that can be done along the way). We are beginning to see the conditioning processes that define us by gender and by sex. Many people are in revolt against this, and many aware that what we are revolting against are media-generated images that attempt to dictate who we are for some larger purpose (mostly, to make money selling us things we don’t need).
The theory, which I understand to be part of postmodernist thought, explores how these images are created and projected into our minds. It seems that at the base of the theory, women are set up to be exhibited and men are given the opportunity to look at them. Feminist and other viewpoints say that this is primarily erotic objectification. By being subjected again and again to the male gaze — which (according to this theory) fixates, divides women into parts and turns them into physical objects without spiritual or intellectual volition — women internalize this phenomenon and see themselves the same way. There is a conditioning process involved.