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From: rshapiro@arris.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Female human aesthetics
Message-ID: <1990Nov11.171709.25842@arris.com>
Date: 16 Nov 90 02:40:51 GMT
References: <9011012313.AA11775@rpp386.Cactus.ORG> <8654@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <658245246@lear.cs.duke.edu>
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In article <658245246@lear.cs.duke.edu> gazit@cs.duke.EDU (Hillel Gazit) writes:
>In article <8654@darkstar.ucsc.edu> (fOoDFoOdfOoDiTYfooD!) writes:

>>I disagree completely.  Women are expected to be beautiful so that
>>they can win the attention of men.

>But they can win the attention of men without being very beautiful.
>...
>The fact is that even in a female-only env. (army, jail) most
>women still try to look as beautiful as possible...

What this shows is only that wanting to be "beautiful" is much more of
an unconscious process, a part of one's identity and self-image, than
a conscious process of wanting to be attractive.

Women are, in our society, objects of spectacle MUCH more than men
are: the movies make this clear even more than advertising, fashion
magazines etc.  A little review of feminist film criticism is probably
in order here.  The earliest articles, especially Laura Mulvey's
highly influential "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", make this
point most strongly: the position of spectator is a male one, that of
spectacle a female one.  Men look, women are looked at.  According to
Mulvey, this is fundamental to the pleasures of (Hollywood) cinema,
pleasures which are available to women only if they adopt a male
viewing position.

Of course these spectator/spectacle roles are purely social
conventions -- it happens to be this way for one social reason or
other, but certainly not due to biology or hormones or any inevitable
law of nature.  In other words, this is an aspect of the oppression of
women (since the position of spectator is clearly the more powerful
one), not a cause of it, except insofar as existing social facts tend
to replicate themselves from one generation to the next.

More recent articles have taken issue with some of Mulvey's
conclusions.  Or rather the simple conclusions have been made more
problematic.  One very interesting article on the general topic of
spectacle and gender, but which approaches it from fashion rather than
cinema, is "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse", by Kaja Silverman
(in STUDIES IN ENTERTAINMENT, ed by Tania Modleski).  Silverman
considers the history of what she calls The Great Masculine
Renunciation (of fashion and, consequently, male spectacle).  In a
concluding paragraph, she writes

  Class distinctions have "softened" and gender distinctions have
  "hardened" since the end of the 18th century. In other words, sexual
  difference [in dress] has become the primary marker of power,
  privilege, and authority, closing the specular gap between men of
  different classes, and placing men and women on opposite sides of
  the great visual divide [ie, spectator and spectacle].

The most recent issue of Camera Obscura is dedicated to the problems
of gender and spectacle, and features brief articles by both Mulvery
and Silverman, as well as many other feminist theorists.