The Subject as Object

After reading The Subject as Object in the Liz Wells book, I kept going back to the heading, Objects of Desire and Disgust, and the small excerpt by John Berger on the relationship between men and women and the male gaze.  Berger states,

"Men look at women.  Women watch themselves being looked at.  This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.  The surveyor of woman in herself is male:  the surveyed female.  Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly and object of vision:  a sight."

I kept playing with the idea of women turning themselves into objects, and that the objectification may have started with man, but it ends with the female reaction to what is happening.  By becoming a sight, which is technically classified as a noun, a woman's appearance becomes an object a man keeps for himself.  I was then interested in the idea of the double objectification, once by the lens of the male eye and again by the lens of the photographic camera.  The reading also stated that although the "concept of objectification has special relevance to photography", women outside the picture frame are already viewed as objects, again reiterating the idea of double objectification.

Also under this heading was the talk of clothing and props to 'signify' differing classes and occupations in erotic imagery.  This just adds another element to the objects used to further objectify the female form.  In the anonymous photograph on the bottom of page 178, the naked woman is sprawled out across a disheveled bed with interior plants, an oriental rug, and patterned fabrics draped across the space.  All of these objects tell a fabricated story of an exotic woman for men to long for and want, much like the 'other' that we discussed from previous readings.