While flipping through the pages of a magazine or looking at portraits of famous stars, one will most likely come across images of half naked men and women posing for the camera. Perhaps the images are trying to sell clothing items or get a specific idea across to the viewer. Whatever the intentions of the image might be, there is a lot more of a thought process going on than a few different poses in front of a camera. Richard Dyer, author of “Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up,” dives further into research about motives why models are portrayed and told to pose certain ways. Specifically in Dyer’s piece he talks regularly about this when it comes to male pin-ups versus females. He makes it seem as if each gender has a certain norm they are supposed to follow in order to grab the eye of the other sex. I will analyze how Dyer argues that men and women view each other based off how they interact and how media in society represents them.
Dyer begins his argument by discussing the different interpretations of looks between men and women. People can assume that women are seen as objects because of the way movies and specific reading materials depict them. Dyer uses the example of a male and female exchanging looks in a movie; “She has seen him, but she doesn’t look at him as he looks at her--having seen him, she quickly resumes being the one who is looked at” (57). In this case, the man does the “looking” and sees the woman as an object and she does not do anything other than remain being looked at. Similarly, this happens in magazines and still pictures of models. Obviously men and women look at each other there is just a difference in how they go about it. Dyer mentions that women watch and listen more to men than men do to them, meaning they think on a deeper level and don’t see the men as just objects (58). This is still present when it comes to images of men being looked at by women. Moreover, “[m]uch of this centre...