A brief research essay on voyeurism and popular culture.

1. Joe Neubert<br />Dr. Roger Stahl<br />SPCM 2360<br />April 17, 2010<br />The Power of Watching: <br />The Everyday Voyeur in Popular Culture<br />The ability to peer into the lives of others unacknowledged has an appeal that speaks to the most basic desires of human psychology. The “fly-on-the-wall” motif that dominates many facets of 21st Century popular culture draws from this desire to see without being seen. In television, photography, literature, and on the Internet eliciting a sense of voyeurism, of seeing without being seen, is a central method for gaining an audience. With this influx of channels encouraging the voyeuristic gaze, power has shifted from the watched to the watcher, and a constant desire to uncover sensational secrets and spectacular ‘real’ situations pervades 21st Century life.<br />According to Yvonne Keller, voyeurism crept its way into American culture during the Cold War. In her 2005 article AB/NORMAL LOOKING: Voyeurism and surveillance in lesbian pulp novels and US Cold War culture, she examines the immense popularity of lesbian pulp novels in America during the 1950s and 1960s and attributes this popularity to the simulated voyeurism gained through these novels. These comics were unabashedly sexist, homophobic, and anxious, giving Americans a hyper-sexualized taste of the exotic. According to Keller, the most popular lesbian pulp comics of the era were “typically lurid, voyeuristic and frequently homophobicquot;
(177). <br />Keller asserts that throughout history, voyeurism has been heavily male and that women have consistently been “at the receiving end, the quot;
watchedquot;
end, of sight, embodiments not of sight-as-power but of quot;
to-be-looked-at-ness” (178). These lesbian novels, written almost entirely by men, provide perfect examples of this sexist gaze. In her article, Keller claims that the Cold War atmosphere these novels were born out of was extremely voyeuristic. She states, “Cold War America was so fearful of surveillance from without that it was spying on its own citizens…” (179). The official inheritance of voyeurism into America’s cultural landscape led it to become normal in American life, and provided the perfect backdrop for the mass distribution of these novels. In her article, Keller traces their popularity, “According to Publishers Weekly's statistics, as of 1975 the first lesbian pulp novel, Women's Barracks, had sold 2,500,000 copies and was the 244th bestselling novel in the US” (177). Other novels in the genre also sold hundreds of thousands of copies. According to Keller, this huge popularity was due to the lesbian pulp novel’s exploitation of the American anxiety of the “other,” in this case the homosexual: <br />The greatest quot;
publicquot;
fear of the dominant culture during this time is fear of the quot;
deviantquot;
Other as manifest in communists and homosexuals, while the greatest quot;
privatequot;
fear is becoming an Other—or liking one, or as the English anthropologist notes, having a son for one. Arguably, the first fear is controlled through surveillance, the second through voyeurism. (181)<br />The lesbian pulp novels of Cold War America provided one of the very first outlets for mass voyeurism in America, allowing Americans a ‘safe’ method in which to desire, identify with, observe, and most importantly remain separate from “the others” (lesbians, homosexuals, and communists) (191). <br />Photography, as a medium, is inherently voyeuristic. It allows an audience to remotely look upon a scene, hold it in its hands, and do so alone and without recognition. The medium is a powerful form of voyeurism in popular culture. The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power, a 2001 article by Paul Frosh, speaks on the voyeuristic properties of photography, stating that a voyeuristic audience feels a “privileged detachment” from the viewed subject. Frosh describes the viewing audience as the “Citizen-Voyeur,” explaining that they have “both the power and the right of the viewer to see representations of the viewed.” And although the photographer frames these representations, Frosh argues that without the “Citizen-voyeur” the photographer has no rights at all. For without an audience, the photographer is nothing. The photographer is forced, through the power of the audience, to offer the everyday citizen the position of a voyeur peeking in on events (50). <br />The photographer’s obligation to the voyeuristic audience is made evident in the huge paparazzi industry. These photographers go to great lengths to catch photos of celebrities in candid, everyday situations. These photos appeal immensely to the voyeuristic public, who yearn to see reality while remaining unseen. The voyeuristic properties of photography were escalated and called into question with Princess Diana’s death, in which the paparazzi played an integral role. The photos that resulted, according to Frosh, force the audience to ask “`why, and by what right and power, do I see this?” (56). Princess Diana’s life was ended due to the audience’s voyeuristic desire to see ‘real life’ and the photos that were produced satisfied, tragically, this voyeuristic desire by displaying a very real and very fatal event. For Frosh, this provides a perfect example of the power of voyeurism in photography, “the power to make visible the real and give reality to the visible” (43). <br />In her 2004 article Reality TV as Advertainment, June Deery identifies the excitement of voyeuristic appeals. According to Deery, “For millennia we have observed fictional drama, but to inspect, unseen, the daily existence of others approaches a god like perspective” (6). She asserts that Reality TV provides this perspective, allowing the viewer to peer into the ‘real’ lives of the onscreen personas. Deery also recognizes that Reality TV participants know they are being watched. Normally this would contradict the idea of voyeurism, but Reality TV remains extremely voyeuristic. “Nevertheless, it is still a gaze, not a two-way exchange and, as with sexual voyeurism, the experience promises the viewers the thrill of seeing something intimate and taboo and doing so remotely and without accountability” (6). The viewer of a Reality TV show is invited to simply watch the action unseen and unheard. And although many shows allow the audience to vote on certain aspects on the show, they are not interactive in the everyday activities of the participants. <br />Jonathan M. Metzi speaks on Reality TV’s voyeuristic properties in his 2004 article From scopophilia to Survivor, a brief history of voyeurism. Metzi, a psychologist, elaborates on America’s inheritance of voyeurism into mainstream culture. When speaking on Reality TV, Metzi states “In these and countless other instances, the ready availability of voyeurism marked not America's deviants, but America itself” (425). He notes the 2001 Fox series “Temptation Island” as a show that allowed its viewers “unlimited (and seemingly unmediated) access to the actionquot;
(426). According to Metzi, Reality TV programmers such as Fox fail to realize that voyeurism is no light-hearted phenomenon, but a real danger. Metzi recognizes that “peering anonymously at unsuspecting others” is a psychological problem, and should never be used as a tool to gain an audience. “To be sure, voyeurism is a mental pathology, as it is a cultural practice that has become normative… [But] voyeurism is also a practice that is culturally pathological, imbued with power, gender and other types of nonchemical imbalances…” (428). To Metzi, a round-the-clock one-way gaze not only enforces the “silence of looking” but also a male-oriented power structure that continuously objectifies women as parts only fit for watching (430). <br />In Deery’s article, she also speaks on the objectifying effects of voyeurism. She argues that anybody’s life, not just a woman’s, can and will be objectified in voyeuristic culture. Deery cites an instance on “Temptation Island” in which a man pleads with the cameraman to turn off the camera during a fight with his significant other, saying, “This is not about the show, this is about my life.” To which the cameraman, still filming, replies, “Actually, your life is the show” (Deery 6). <br />Voyeurism, the gratification gained from seeing others without being seen, is clearly at work in popular culture, evident in the population’s fixation with seeing real people in real situations without being recognized as the audience. The voyeuristic approach to events is evident in many facets of American life. Voyeurism embedded itself in American life during the Cold War in the form of pulp comics, playing off of American fears of and fascinations with ‘others,’ and quickly spread to photography, television, and other media. Now people can fulfill their voyeuristic desires simply by turning on a Reality TV show, flipping through a tabloid magazine, or surfing the Internet. The ‘other’ is now everybody else. <br />The implications of embracing voyeurism into culture are wide, diverse, and significant. Voyeurism encourages sensationalism, even sadism, by fostering in its audience a desire to see the most sexually explicit and exciting images available (Metzi 430). It acts as a form of suppression and power by skewing audiences’ perceptions of reality (Keller 191). Most importantly it fosters a dull, uncritical, viscerally compelled audience perfectly suited for manipulation and control (Deery 18).<br />Works Cited<br />Deery, June. quot;
Reality TV as Advertainment.quot;
Popular Communication 2.1 (2004): 1-20. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.<br />Frosh, Paul. quot;
The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.quot;
Social Semiotics 11.1 (2001): 43-59. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.<br />Keller, Yvonne. quot;
Voyeurism and surveillance in lesbian pulp novels and US Cold War culture.quot;
Feminist Media Studies 5.2 (2005): 177-195. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.<br />Metzi, Jonathan M. quot;
From scopophilia to Survivor, a brief history of voyeurism.quot;
Textual Practice 18.3 (2004): 415-434. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 Apr. 2010.<br />