Seminar 2- Continued

Chapter 4, 'The Look' in 'Reading Images'

by Rosalind Coward, 1986

The key points and quotes featured within the reading:

• 'There's a preoccupation with the visual image- of self and others- and a concomitant anxiety about how these images measure up to a socially prescribed ideal.'- This suggests how women should look and how society has created an aim for which each women should to seek to obtain and portrays a sense of anxiety.  

• 'While I don't wish to suggest there's an intrinsically male way of making images, there can be little doubt that entertainment as we know it is crucially predicted on a masculine investigation of women and a circulation of women's images ford men.'-This statement is implying that the images are created by men, extending the theory that the visual culture is written by the eyes of the male gender. 

• 'Women is flesh, often feel emobarrassed, irritated or downright angered by men's perseistant gaze...those women on billboards, though; they look back.'- Women in the street often don't appreciate the gaze of the male, it can make them feel objectified and uncomfortable  Therefore it is made less sociably acceptable. However women in the images of billboards and adverts can be notices as their purpose is to appeal to men. They offer engaging looks back which fulfil the male fantasy. 

• 'In this society, looking has become a crucial aspect of sexual relations'-Suggesting that initially it is the appearance of a a male and female that draws an attraction. The society has become overly concerned with appearance. 

• 'The saturation of society with images of women has nothing to do with men's natural appreciation of objective beauty...and everything to do with an obsessive recording and use of women's images in ways which make men feel comfortable'-This assumption conveys that in fact it  is to with the way that the male gender view the fantasy rather than the reality. In some ways, the fantasy proves a safer environment.

• '...women are bound to this power precisely because visual impressions have been elevated to the position of holding the key to our psychic well-being, our social success and indeed to whether or not we will be loved.'-Suggesting that women have to live up to the expectations that have been created by not only by men but supported by society. Women begin to conform to the submissive and passive behaviour that is created in the male fantasy. 

• '...a preference for looking at women's bodies, for keeping women separate ..perhaps this sex-at-a-distance is the only complete secure relation which men can have with women.'-This idea implies that it is maybe better to just look rather than get too close as their are less consequences and therefore no disappointment.

• 'Advertising in this society builds precisely on the creation of an anxiety to the effect that, unless we measure up, we will not be loved.'-Women spend too much time and effort trying to meet societies expectations. However these expectations were created by men and their fantasies. 

• 'Where women's behaviour was previously controlled directly by state, family or church, control of women is now also effected through the scrutiny of women by visual ideals.'-Suggesting that nowadays the women's behaviour is now controlled by their own decisions and there mind based on the images that media expose them to.