1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972
“Men act and women appear. 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.”
Convention: “men active / women passive”
http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/gender.html
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=50530369685&topic=7313
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=50530369685&topic=7313#!/topic.php?ui
d=50530369685&topic=7314
http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/238/studyguide_238.pdf

2. Berger’s Gender Oppositions
Male Female
• Active (do) • Passive (talk)
• Dominant • Submissive
• Hard • Soft
• Intelligent • Intuitive
• (hard) muscles • (soft) curves
• Rational • Emotional
• Strong • Weak
• thoughtful • impulsive

3. Over-generalisation but…
• Broad template for mainstream (mass) media
to represent gender
• Advertising reinforces these traditional
(patriarchal) oppositions – unsurprisingly as it
is central to the political economy of the
media (and a form that articulates bourgeois-
capitalist ideologies – reinforces the
hegemony)