A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another….
One might simplify this by saying: 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. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
John Berger, 1972 Ways of seeing
Women as objects of design
Wise words from John Berger. After so many years, still relevant today. Every woman will recognize this, I think. The woman is, willingly or unwillingly, a design issue. How do women shape themselves? More specifically, how do contemporary working women with ambition—women who want to build a career—do that? What do they look like? How do they behave? Who inspires them? This interactive lecture addresses these questions.
Fictional women as role models
As in my other lectures and training sessions, I use fictional characters to search for answers to these questions—women we know from film and television. The beauty of these fictional women is that they offer us a unique glimpse into their lives. Our eyes follow the camera, which takes us to places where we don’t normally see women in real life. We see these women up close, not only in the kitchen, on the street, or at the office. We follow them to the night café, the bedroom, the bathroom, and even the toilet. We see them writing in diaries. We see them lie. We see them cry in loneliness and be unreasonable. We see them fall. We see them rise. In short, we see everything. This allows us to form an image of their motives. We can identify with them. That’s why women on the big screen, aside from being a source of entertainment, are also influential role models.
NETFLIX offers a rich source of strong female characters. Women who struggle with combining the different roles assigned to them—mother, daughter, lover, wife, friend, career woman, boss, and manager. These “superwomen” have a hard time. They must possess an impressive set of (often very contradictory) traits: caring, loyal, independent, chaste, attractive, empathetic, strict, result-oriented, and stress-resistant.
Examining prejudices
Where does this self-imposed image come from? Why is the bar set so high? According to Berger, men watch women, and women watch each other. We don’t just watch, we also judge. Consciously and unconsciously, we hold all sorts of prejudices and blind spots. This interactive lecture, which is explicitly also intended for men, delves into these prejudices—specifically, prejudices about women in the workplace. Women with jobs. Women who are not dependent on “their” man or any man because they earn their own income. Women with ambition. Women with responsibilities. Women with talents.
Starring:
Phryne Fisher – Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Sandy – Grease, Susan – Desperately Seeking Susan, Birgitte Nyborg – Borgen, Betty Draper & Peggy Olson – Mad Men, Jessica Pearson, Rachel Zane & Donna Paulson – Suits, and many others.
