Discuss these questions with your group. Bring in notes on your answers.

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another (Berger, Ways of Seeing 46).


  1. Explain Berger's point in the above quote. Why do you think he believes a woman's appearance is so connected to her success? Do you agree?
  2. Explain how the composition of the Rayban ad invokes a sense of the woman watching herself being watched. Who is watching whom?
  3. Make up a storyline to go with this ad. How would gender roles fit into the story?
  4. Explain Berger's point about women's consciousness.
A woman has a split self - herself watching herself being herself - "the surveyor and the surveyed" (Berger 46).

5. Berger also believes that ads work by appealing to the buyers' envy of the people in the ad. Explain what Berger is saying below about how ads work.

**Remember that by 'publicity' he means advertising.

Publicity persuades us of [the possibility of personal] transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. (131)
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product. (134)

5. Do you think many women would envy the woman in the Rayban ad? Why? What is it about the picture that makes her look so good! Would many men want to go out with her?

6. What sort of values and lifestyles in our society might make lots of people envy this Rayban woman?

Go back to Understanding stereotypes: media