Laura Mulvey's Narcissism Paper

“Woman…[are] bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command, by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning not maker of meaning” (Mulvey 1). Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist who wrote a psychoanalysis paper called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, believes that the gendered gaze, a symbolic theory that holds that men drive society while woman act as mere “provoking” objects to men, is beginning to take hold of society and everyday life. John Berger, who interestingly enough wrote his book, Ways of Seeing, two years before Mulvey’s paper, explains how “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at… thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger 47).

As social networking sites began to erupt throughout the country in the past decade, such as Facebook and MySpace, users slowly began morphing sexism and misogyny into these sites. Andrew Mendelson and Zizi Papacharissi, authors of the sociological analysis, Look at us: Collective Narcissism in College Student Facebook Photo Galleries, show through statistical evidence that woman have a higher number of pictures, comments, selfies, and cyber friends, thus allowing themselves to be targeted by other users. Though social networking allows an equal opportunity for both males and females to express their identities, females are highly more articulating their lives as symbolic creations of their worlds, thus allowing themselves to become mere objects, which in turn concretes the idea of the gendered gaze that both Mulvey and Berger hypothesized