Emma Stern's Eulogy for The Male Gaze
The artist Emma Stern’s work features women who are unabashed in their hotness, the Male Gaze be damned.
Portraits by Serie Yoon
The Male Gaze has been a specter in my life, the haunting discourse surrounding my favorite images throughout art history. I’ve often wondered how to kill a ghost that persistently hovers about, a ubiquitous force that implores me to ask: Is the Male Gaze in the room with us right now? I acknowledge it must be assessed head-on.
During an Impressionist seminar at Pratt Institute in 2013, I and a bevy of hungover art-school undergraduates were introduced to the Male Gaze (TMG). Cast onto a projector screen was Édouard Manet’s “final masterpiece:” “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” in which a heavy-lidded woman looks unenthused and slightly annoyed as she tends bar. We, the viewers, stand opposite the counter, taking her in. Truth be told, she’s hot. Behind her appears a large mirror, and in its reflection, we presumably see her gaze: a fashionable crowd of bar goers, indistinct in a painterly jumble. Upon further inspection, we see the reflection of a mustachioed man tucked into the corner, to whom our barmaid is allegedly tending. Conversely to the piece’s protagonist, this man is decisively prosaic. He’s plain. And though you might miss him at a glance, this man’s point of view was precedent for our seminar. The running doctrine in academia asserts that we, the viewer, see through his eyes. We must understand that his line of vision is the true subject of the painting. It’s an established dogma of art history; it’s also completely untrue.
In 2001, Dr. Malcolm Park recreated “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” through intricate staging and photography. The team, buoyed by the exacting finesse of photography, found that “the conversation transpiring between the barmaid and gentleman was an optical trick—the man stands outside the painter’s field of vision, to the left, and looks away from the barmaid.” Eventually, it was concluded that due to the laws of perspective, the alleged male “gazer” could not possibly share the perspective of the painting’s viewer and certainly could not be looking directly at the barmaid.
Maybe it was Manet’s willful ignorance of mathematical constraints of perspective, or possibly it was artistic liberty. Fringe theorists assert it is not a mirror at all, and what has falsely been presumed as a reflection of our barmaid’s verso is, in fact, a second barmaid with her back to the viewer. Nonetheless, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” was landmarked as an example of TMG, despite the peer-reviewed debunking a decade earlier. The painting’s lasting value and historical significance was a falsely perpetuated importance of assigned heterosexual male subjectivity.
“The Male Gaze inherently implies an unequal social power between a male gazer and a woman subject.”
Even as I struggled to remain cogent during the seminar, my 20-year-old brain, subsisting on coffee, Advil, and Four Loko, found it dubious that this painting of a woman was about a man. Nevertheless, I passed the course and forgot about the hot barmaid at the Folies-Bergère.
When my 2022 solo exhibition, Booty! opened at Half Gallery in New York City, the show chronicled an erotic and fantastical trio of sexy swashbuckling avatar babes swinging from ropes, peering from the crow’s nest, and guarding an enormous treasure chest in various stages of undress. Booty! was fun; it was camp; it was hot, and overall well-received. Then, a week before closing, I saw the headline: “Enter the World of Emma Stern, Where [Avatars] Roam Free Against the Male Gaze.” Somehow, the ghost of TMG was back, and this time it was haunting my booty.
In the near decade since I attended art school, I’ve come to loathe inference to TMG and have actively avoided using the term when discussing my work. Not only because TMG is overused and uninspired, but also because of its lack of meaningful and modern application as a reduction of women into sexual objects. TMG inherently implies an unequal social power between a male gazer and a woman subject. This was applicable in previous centuries, when women were too preoccupied with darning socks, having fainting spells, and being burned at stakes to develop artistic practices in their leisure time, but it falls apart in our present-day reality. Anyone may be either an artist, a viewer, or both; any gender may become their subject. This is not to say we’ve solved the disequilibrium issue—we certainly have not. Still, we must be careful not to reinforce or reintroduce TMG when we discord contemporary art history.
Perhaps most frustrating about the article was that once the reader got past the headline, there was essentially no further mention of TMG or related discourse. The review was complimentary and predominantly focused on my digital-to-analog process, not the paintings’ content. The hasty citation of TMG in the headline functioned as a tepid disclaimer: “These images you are about to see may at first appear misogynistic, but don’t worry! They’re a critique of misogynistic imagery and should be understood ironically.” It’s a counterintuitive assessment, and one I do not believe to be possible. I reject the notion that anything can truly be enjoyed “ironically” because enjoyment, by definition, must be authentic, not ironic. Can’t we just admit that something can be satisfying and pleasing to look at on a horny, reptile-brain level? In the same way, you can say whatever you want if you claim irony. Invoking TMG enables thinking like: “I like the painting of the pirate with her breasts out, but not because she has her breasts out. I like it because it is a commentary on other people who like this painting because she has her breasts exposed. And I’m not like those guys, Babe, I swear!”
Despite my own resistance to it, I acknowledge that reference to TMG is a recurrent discussion surrounding both my paintings and the extended performance piece that is my social media presence. And I get it. My art and my online persona (which, for the purposes of this conversation, are interchangeable) are performative and self-objectifying. I play with hyper-femininity and visual tropes historically associated with misogyny. Some may attribute my attitude to internalized misogyny, but I would rather attribute it to Late Stage Feminism, and as a Late Stage Feminist, isn’t it my prerogative to decide which aspects of the patriarchy I want to uphold or perpetuate for personal gain, for pleasure, or simply just for LOLs?
“To be beautiful, one must be born that way, but anyone can be hot.”
When discussing TMG becomes the central talking point specifically concerning my paintings, it revokes my agency not only as the artist, but also as the subject of these works, which I consider to be self-portraits; and frankly, it is offensive. It denies the subject the opportunity to be seen authentically, denies the artist the opportunity to tell stories, and denies the viewer the opportunity to interpret them. This work is about me: my vulnerabilities, pain, joy, lived experiences, memories, and fantasies. The assertion that I stand “against the Male Gaze” implies that they must be a critique of and exist only to some hypothetical male audience. The message is that hot women as subject matter in art may only be interpreted as problematic, and we solve that problem with abnegation rather than discussion.
My pirate babes and I are not victims of TMG because we are hot. Though, it is important here to distinguish between “beautiful” and “hot.” They are not the same thing. To be beautiful, one must be born that way, but anyone can be hot. Princess Diana was beautiful; Khloé Kardashian is hot. Contemporary hotness is intersectional and transcends gender and sexuality. Just ask the bimbos, himbos, thembos, and bimboys on TikTok. The kids get it. Being hot is a conscious decision, a lifestyle one consensually enters into. Hotness is taken on. Hotness is aspirational. If you dress hot, act hot, do hot things, and smell good, then you are hot. When one decides to be hot, they are exercising their creative autonomy. I exercise this when painting sexy pirates with huge knockers on a jet ski riding into the sunset.
With suspicious synchronicity, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” appeared in headlines in late 2021, just before Booty!’s opening. More than a century after its 1882 Paris Salon premiere, the painting caused commotion from within London’s The Courtauld Gallery. The gallery, which boasts one of the world’s largest anthologies of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, had recently enjoyed a £57 million refurbishment fulfilling superficial renovations and modernization, including assembling a review committee to address contemporary concerns of racism and sexism. Among the historical masterworks to receive a new placard was “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” which stated: “The enigmatic expression [of the woman] is unsettling, especially as she appears to be interacting with a male customer.” Some, myself included, were less than pleased. Though the intention here is understandable, its application seems excessive compared to necessary updates. Among other revised placards were Paul Gauguin’s “Nevermore,” which recognizes his popularization of Primitivism, which contributed to “the widespread racist fantasy of Tahitian girls as sexually precocious [and which] led to their unabashed exploitation.” This is an accurate and fair allegation against the artist and is fundamentally warranted. His paintings depict sex crimes against children, and formal written acknowledgment of these atrocities does make them slightly more palatable. I’ll be bold and commend the gallery for not removing Gauguin from the exhibition altogether. It is part of a museum’s responsibility to give context and rework the lexicon per marked shifts in cultural temperature, though I would be remiss if associated with far-right digital soldiers Tweeting about waging war on the past.
The situation with Manet’s hot barmaid is markedly different. When museum boards are forced to contend with the dubious fate of art history’s problematic past, they sometimes inadvertently distort the experience of other artwork. The suggestion that Manet’s painting is “unsettling” is subjective and may, in effect, unsettle a viewer who otherwise would not be. Personally, I don’t find the painting unsettling. I find it boring, but “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” isn’t about me, it is about Suzon. She was a real person, a real bartender at the real bar at the Folies-Bergère. (You can still go there—try the French fries!)
“I reject the notion that anything can truly be enjoyed ‘ironically’ because enjoyment, by definition, must be authentic.”
I feel for Suzon (I am, after all, an empath). The painting was staged at Manet’s studio, where she was posed as he painted her likeness. Realistically, I can’t imagine it was an enjoyable experience for her. Worse, she suffered posing to retroactively be backgrounded as a supporting character rather than as the painting’s lead. The Courtauld Gallery’s decision to highlight the “presence of a man” serves to draw attention to him, not only as a compositional element but also as the point of view, thus assigning heterosexual maleness to a viewer regardless of gender or orientation. If we follow this line of thinking, Manet’s worldview is the subject of the painting, not Suzon’s. In attempting to rectify TMG, the placard text has re-invoked it, perpetually trapping Suzon in Manet’s line of vision rather than granting her agency and personhood. It introduces her as a victim to viewers who may otherwise have looked upon Suzon and experienced their own idiosyncratic interaction with her.
To this, I ask: to what end? Was anyone upset about a hot barmaid before? Was anyone “unsettled”? Is TMG even in the room with us right now? The Courtauld Gallery’s new placard isn’t altogether disconnected from my own disclaimer, which permitted enjoyment of my paintings because they’re ironically misogynistic, not actually misogynistic. Once more, we are forced to declare: “I like the painting of the hot bartender with the cinched waist, juicy kissable lips, and cleavage up to her chin, but not because she’s hot with a cinched waist, juicy kissable lips, and cleavage up to her chin. I like it because it is a commentary on the artist, who was a misogynist. I’m not like that guy. Babe, I swear!”
The poltergeist of the Male Gaze which follows me (and Suzon) must be banished. So here I invoke a banishing spell: There is no inherent misogyny in images of hot women, in the pursuit of hotness, in the artistic practice of hotness, or in performing it conspicuously. Rather, misogyny is in attributing all displays of and acts of hotness to either pursuance of TMG or the subversion of TMG. In either scenario, women are denied agency to claim ownership of hotness as something authentic and not purely reactionary to a male point of view. And now, if it’s alright with everyone, I will return to objectifying myself in peace.
