male gaze versus female gaze

“woman as image, man as bearer of the look” The Oppositional Gaze, 123, Bell Hooks
For me the problem with the male gaze is that our men are learning that the woman are like an object and I don’t want to be general - to say that every men are the same - but it is true that the way that men see women is like an object because this society is dominated by men, even if women have power, men still have more power than them and the knowledge that the society receives is that women have to be beautiful all the time, but not beautiful inside, first outside and then inside, and we are all the time fighting to be perfect for this society : be nice, be intelligent, be a good worker, try to get this ideal of womanhood but we can’t because we are not perfect, we are only human, but it is really hard to accept that, to renounce this ideal. For this, I think that the biggest problem is that we have to deal with our own insecurities. Moreover, these insecurities increased with time and we feel like we are "not enough" for this society.
For me, you can find many illustrative examples in magazine like Vogue or Glamour that are selling to women that they have to have a perfect body, wear the perfect clothes. If you are not as it is willing at the moment, they try to teach you how to get it, not only that but they make you feel like to have to get it to be accepted. In reaction to this insecurity feeling, we have to create an oppositional gaze to fight against it. For this I agree with Bell Hooks, that we need this to break the stereotypes that this society has shaped. The oppositional gaze means that we have to no accept the "normal", and to create a new critical gaze in reaction to that.

Before reading this, I felt that did not like the way that the media represent women but this reading help me to have concrete explanation about it. In my personal case, I live in a country (Spain) that cares about how the women look, but when I arrived in the USA, I realized that here it is even worst, the image of the women is more exploited in the way that you have to be nice and perfect all the time. I really admire the women that are living here, in this country because it is really hard to survive!