Representations of women

"One might simplify this by saying men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at." This is a bold quote from Ways of seeing - John Berger. This does indeed seem to be the most stereotypical way, however is it the only way?

Laura Mulvey's 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema' (1975) covers my next topic nicely.

"There are circumstances in which looking is a source of pleasure" but also "there is pleasure in being looked at". Some of the general ideas about female representations are based upon active male and passive female - the male is the one doing the looking and the female is the one being looked at.

Mulvey takes a lot of her ideas from Sigmund Freud. She found that he associated scopophillia (the pleasure in looking) as objectifying other people. At an extreme, this can produce voyeurs and 'peeping Toms' who's only sexual satisfaction can come from watching an objectified other in an controlling sense. She says that the cinema is the prime place to allow the active man to do this (by way of observing the beautiful on screen women). She also says that the male spectator and male protagonist are united - they become one man looking at woman.

In a later article, Mulvey said that woman can either identify with the woman on screen; admitting defeat that it's okay to be objectified by male in such a way OR identify with with the male spectator and allow herself to appreciate and look at the beauty of on-screen woman. 

Trying to relate this to my piece was rather difficult. The 'male gaze' is something that tends not to be featured in children's animations as children do not yet have that level of sexual maturity. However, some children's programmes are very obvious with their gender choices e.g. Bob the builder is very stereotypically male - it would seem all his basic traits are stereotypically male: he is a builder, his clothes, his name, his voice etc etc. where as Fizz from the Tweenies appears to be very stereotypically female: pink clothes, dress with flowers on, long hair, high voice etc etc. However I seem to find that when the character isn't human, the gender lines can become slightly blurred. Programmes with animalistic or alien characters can often not be so obvious with gender of their characters. For example... 

The octonauts - these characters are a near equal split of each gender. I guessed which ones female and got it wrong! There aren't really any stereotypical traits of their gender obvious about them, more their traits as an animal.

Also, the fimbles. The two fimbles in the foreground are female, however both inclue a colour which is stereotypically male.