Extract from Ways of seeing, Penguin Modern Classics, 1972

In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.
In modern art the category of the nude has become less important. Artists themselves began to question it. In this, as in many other respects, Manet represented a turning point. If one compares his Olympia with Titian’s original, one sees a woman, cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewhat defiantly.
The ideal was broken. But there was little to replace it except the ‘realism’ of the prostitute – who became the quintessential woman of early avant-garde twentieth century painting (Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Rouault, German Expressionism, etc.). In academic painting the tradition continued.

Today the attitudes and values which informed that tradition are expressed through more widely diffused media – advertising, journalism, television.
But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the « ideal » spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. If you have any doubt that this is so, make the following experiment. Choose from this book an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man. Either in your mind’s eye or by drawing on the reproduction. Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.

See more: Episode 2 of John Berger groundbreaking BBC Ways of seeing series