A Spectator Sport

"Men act and woman appear," writes Berger, who then goes on to say "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (281). The idea that men are the spectator and women are the mechanisms of male flattery, is at once simplistic, but while I hesitate to agree with that sort of generalization the empirical data seems worthwhile. What's more interesting in Berger's assessment is that while it was men who relegated women to being the "image designed to flatter him" women perpetuate that constructed reality (281). How do women's relation to themselves effect both other women as well as the male spectator?

And moreover, drawing from hooks, women, white feminist theorists in fact, often ignore the gaze of certain women completely (a passive perpetuation, perhaps). If, as Berger suggests, women turn themselves into objects, and "objects of vision," how do women, being of different races, ethnicities, histories, reconcile the different visions they have rendered? Ultimately, are certain women in fact the stronger arbiters of the avoidance of certain womens' gazes and objectified realities? What does it mean, and how can it be applied more broadly, that "black women were able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator" (313)?