What is a man to the female gaze?

I began to think about where I could go next with the female gaze and I thought it would be interesting and new to look at the male body through a female perspective. We see women all the time through a male gaze that sometimes its difficult to distinguish between our own point of view and our internalised male gaze. Women are sexualised and commodified for male consumption. Where as men are interesting characters, if they are flawed it is for good reason. There is usually substance to men in media where as women are mostly to be seen, ‘Men act and women appear’ as John Berger says. So what are men through a female gaze?

I began thinking about this in what women want from men. The male gaze looks at women as what they can offer to benefit them. So what do we want from men? What do I want from men? I feel we often personify things as women. We romanticise things. In our heads we end up looking at the potential of what we want, we give them thoughts but not only that, empathy. We imagine men caring about us and our needs. We care about their needs and them. So why would it be so far fetched to put this on the men we romanticise. This gave me good ideas of where to start and what I wanted to create with this and my male model, once lockdown rules eased. I thought about positioning my male model in ways similar to Hopper in his later pieces

In this stunning painting, Morning Sun, I looked at in my Artist Research I love how the woman isn’t performing the artist. She is simply existing and living that moment, thinking in the sunlight. You can tell she has thoughts and feelings running through her head, she isn’t existing just to be viewed. This unusual approach could be due to the fact the woman portrayed is Hoppers wife, he doesn’t view her as just a model but also as a person. He has a lot of appreciation and empathy for this person. I would love to be able to capture something similar. A person with thoughts and feelings existing alongside them, not just to be looked at but to be felt and empathised with by the viewer. Romanticised by the artist. An ideal, lovely moment to share. This will not be a man ‘acting’ or sharing his wealth and power. He will be a person. A person with thoughts and feelings that the viewer can relate to. A person captured in time in a peaceful, ideal moment.

I will have to wait for when I can work with a model again, but I can’t wait to play around with capturing the person that he is, not just him visually. I think I have been able to capture this before in some previous drawings, bits of his personality coming through as I draw. That would be ideal and is what I want to achieve.

References

Painting- Morning Sun– Hopper, E. (1952). Morning Sun. [Oil on canvas] Available at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/edward-hopper/morning-sun [Accessed 8 Mar. 2021].