Beyonce and her Influence

Faith Beglane

March 6, 2015

Beyoncé and her Influence

            This week, we had to find a music video that portrayed the female gaze.  The female gaze is how women look at themselves, and how we as women look at ourselves and other women around us. Most people in the class picked videos that showed role reversal. The females were the more dominant gender. These videos showed how women want to be portrayed, but I think we all know that women are not looked as the more dominant gender in society. I choose Beyoncé’s video Pretty Hurts. The music video shows how women look at themselves. The video is based around a pageant show. This is ironic because women are constantly judging one another by their looks to either boost their own self-esteem, or to bring others down. Either way, we see women doing a lot more of this then men. Later in the video, it shows women changing the way that their bodies look to perfect their flaws. Humans were made to have flaws but women are always expected to change them. Men don’t have to wear makeup, or maintain a perfectly toned body the same way that women are expected to. Beyoncé makes this her main point in the video, but says lines like “it’s the soul that needs the surgery.” Her point is that women shouldn’t feel that they have to change their external beauty because beauty radiates from the inside too.  Although this doesn’t focus on the female gaze from the gender perspective, I believe that it still strongly represents the female gaze because the way women look and treat each other has to improve for women to get the rights that we want. Women need to collaborate and become less prone to stereotypes. We as women are so quick to place judgment on someone based solely off of what their wearing, the color of their skin, hair color, ect. I think that these images shown through the Pretty Hurts music video represents exactly this point. Everyone is self-conscious is some way and when we feel like we are constantly being judged, it can be contradicting to the whole feminist movement. Beyoncé shows this not only through this music video, but on several others as well. Her message stays the same, that women deserve better and that we need to treat each other better. She makes it clear that looks are not everything but society makes look into everything. She is known as a feminist for these reasons and I think with her fame and success, her message is starting to get through to more people.