male gaze

The Panopticon prison is a prison that has its residents act as both the jailer as well as the prisoner. The prison is has such visibility that the prisoners feel the affect of the jailors gaze causing them to act as their own jailors by regulation their own behavior. This same concept of people regulating their behavior with out any formal rules can be seen in how women regulate their own behavior and practices of gender ideology that perpetuates gender inequality.
However, it is not a jailor who’s gaze that women are responding to but the male gaze. The male gaze is the dominate gaze of our patricidal culture. The male gaze has the power to say what is beautiful, worthy, and socially acceptable. Women see media images in the fashion of the male gaze and use that to construct their gender ideologies. Women are bombarded by ads and magazines of stick thin white women who are revered by the male gaze as the ideals of feminine beauty. Thus, women strive to achieve this unrealistic body, and white features. When these women do achieve, to some degree, these ideals, they feel a since of power and satisfaction. This sensation is called repressive satisfaction. Repressive satisfactions is born from the way conforming makes one feel good. Thus women construct their ideas of what it means to be feminine by how well they can conform to the ideals of the male gaze and how they good feel from be in accepted/sense of power after conforming. This allows for the cycle of repression of women to continue, by falsely giving women a sense of control/power. This allows for women to remain repressed, but not be aware of their repression because they feel that they made their own choices. If women are too busy trying to conform and feel good, they will not try and rebel and turn they patriarchal system upside down.