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From: uunet!mailrus!sharkey!hela!iti.org!dhw@ncar.ucar.EDU ("David H. West")
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Female human aesthetics
Message-ID: <1990Nov16.161821.17287@iti.org>
Date: 16 Nov 90 16:44:50 GMT
References: <8654@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <658245246@lear.cs.duke.edu> <1990Nov11.171709.25842@arris.com>
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In article <1990Nov11.171709.25842@arris.com> rshapiro@arris.com (Richard Shapiro) writes:
>Women are, in our society, objects of spectacle MUCH more than men
>are: the movies make this clear even more than advertising [...]
>Men look, women are looked at.  According to
>Mulvey, this is fundamental to the pleasures of (Hollywood) cinema [...]
>the position of spectator is clearly the more powerful one [...]

It's quite unclear to me that there is any power difference; in
"everyday life", the spectatee is free to spectate right back, and in
situations like cinema and fashion shows, the spectatee is being paid
to do a job, but not by the spectators, who, though they pay for the
right to spectate, have no direct control over the spectatees.  If
what you are saying is that there is more power upstream of a money
flow, that's true but not gender-specific.

>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.

Well, that's a relief.  Few biologists, though, express this degree
of certainty.

-David West           dhw@iti.org