When walking through a shopping mall, advertisements can be seen everywhere and in every store, including advertisements with females wearing just their undergarments, or short skirts, or even advertisements for makeup or lotion; these are all examples of the male gaze in society. The male gaze is an epidemic as to how women are seen or expected to look and act based on the views heterosexual men, who enact their unwanted or degrading observations upon women. The male gaze can be found pretty much anywhere.  It is something we seem to not be able to get away from.  It can be found in anything involving media. It affects everyone in society, especially women, and it often affects women negatively with their own physical expectations, sexual expectations and self-esteem.

The male gaze can be seen or found everywhere, for example in magazine advertisements, movies, art, songs, anything media related, and even in women’s everyday lives and wardrobes.  In the Black Eyed Peas’ song, My Humps, it is all about a women’s body and her “humps”. As long as a woman has these “humps” or “lumps” she can get whatever she wants from a man. So as long as a woman has “lumps” she is sexy, guys want to have sex with her, dance with her, drive men crazy, and that men will buy her whatever her heart desires. Women are being pressured to be super skinny to have “humps” to be truly successful and “sexy”. But if you are female and don’t have these “humps” then you can’t possibly be as successful and pleasing to males as females with these “humps”. This song is a perfect example of sexual objectification of females, which is when heterosexual males view women as sexual objects instead of a whole person.

 Magazines are a big part of the male gaze and sexual objectification too.  In magazine covers advertised towards women, such as a cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, the male gaze is prominent portrays the perfect woman with airbrushed skin, hair being blown back, deep plunging neckline to reveal a well-endowed yet photo shopped chest, a short dress or bottoms to reveal the cover girl’s “perfect” photo shopped   legs and/or bottom, and of course articles about sex and sexuality. Most magazine covers resemble this with the cover girls all looking perfect, all are wearing something revealing and they all talk about sex. These magazines all have articles about fashion, makeup, hair, what to do and how to act when you’re in bed, they all tell you the same thing, which is what society perceives females to be in the eyes of men.

Movies are also a big influence of society and the male gaze, the movie 18-year-Old Virgin, the title alone is demeaning to every woman. The movie poster shows a woman seen topless trying to cover up herself and looking horrified. The title of the movie makes us realize what the male gaze has done to our society, where it makes being an 18 year old virgin not okay. Many young women think it is abnormal to be an 18 year old virgin, because of the male gaze and movies similar to this.  So they are feeling pressured to go with the “norm” by not being a virgin, to grow up faster, and to give in to the sexual-objectification.

         The male gaze has a huge effect on society, the way Hollywood and/or the media portrays females is just unrealistic and demeaning to every female. In any movie or TV show if one pays close attention ,the sexual objectification is obvious when the camera zooms in on female’s body parts such as her chest, butt, legs, and stomach. These women are seen as simply body parts, and even if the camera zooms out to show the whole female, it’s the body parts that stay with you because it’s put in our mind that all she really is, is an object, just a body part and not a full human being. With the thought of females just being body parts, it catches on to society and society starts to view females this way, judging females based on their body and sexuality instead of who they really are. Females have to try and live up to the body expectations to be accepted into society, they have to be thin, have long legs, a big chest and a big butt, they have to be proportionate, and if all this is mastered then and only then can society see them as “perfect” and “sexy”. Females often do believe this so they over diet, exercise, wear wonder bras, get plastic surgery, and wear little to nothing in order to have the “perfect body”.

         The male gaze can really harm females of any age; my nine-year-old niece often gets made fun of in school because she happens to have really dark skin. Because of the male gaze it has become unacceptable to be beautiful and have really dark or pale skin, to be beautiful you have to be a perfect shade of tan, and even a nine-year-olds know this from seeing the male gaze in action. The age of nine is also around the age that I started to be made fun of for being naturally too thin, having “twig” legs, and not developing physically as fast as the other girls in my grade. Eleven years later I can still remember the cruel things I was told about my body not being as developed and not leading up to the impossible expectations that the male gaze has set up. Being made fun of for not living up to the male gaze is something that still sticks with me and sometimes still affects the way I look at my body. Whether you are nine, twenty, fifty, or eighty the male gaze still affects you because society will always have these expectations of what is “beauty”.  Not living up to the impossible physical and sexual expectations that comes with the male gaze really lowers females’ self-esteem, and those who have seem to meet the expectations of the male gaze in reality have not; it’s all fake, it’s all an act.