1. Being naked means being yourself, being who you are. But when we talk about nude it means being watched by someone else. I believe the most significant difference between them is the loss of the essence. When women are depicted nude in art they get material values, being seen as an object. We can use as an example the Brazilian Carnaval, women are exposed seminaked in the most commercials and advertisements as a trophy.

2. According to Berger, the paintings do not represent the women’s own feelings but their submission for the men, they are created for the male satisfaction. The pictures represent women being constantly judged by men, where the most beautiful women will be “chosen” by them. The woman is seen as a sexual object. I believe that it is still possible to see many men who see women as an object, as cleaner or as someone that needs to be there to serve them, as represented in the depictions.

3. In Berger’s description the mirror is represented as a vanity symbol of women. He also highlights that the pictures are painted for the men’s pleasure. While a woman looks at herself through the mirror, she’s thinking of the way men will see her. During his interview some of the women described the paintings as unreal, saying that the older European art paintings do not show dynamism and women are represented in a humiliation context, portraying women as “inanimate pleasure symbol”.

In the European painting, there are differences between nakedness and nude. Theses differences are more visible for women than men because of the tradition. For John Berger, being necked is to be oneself and being nude is to be seeing necked by others and not yet recognize by oneself. That mean we can compare nudity to the object such as how we see women in the art without clothes. Therefore, we can realize that this form of women representation can be applied to pictures and we can illustrate this fact in many images we have seen in our life.

At the beginning of this episode, Berger said that men dream to women and women dream to themselves. Also, he mentioned that women are taught how to appear to others, particularly to men because in the western tradition, the community taught women that their success depend to the way they look like for men. In this situation, western works of art consider women as an object that the beauty can be appreciate by men. These depictions have influenced the way we think, the place of women in our society. But in our modern society, women are fighting to be considered not as men’s objects but as a person who has the right as men. In the episode, we see the conversation between Berger and some women around the table, we can understand how these women want the society change the perception of western tradition painting related to the nudity of women.
During the presentation, we see women using mirror to look themselves and Berger shows some arts where women are looking themselves in the mirror. What are they looking for by using the mirror? Are they looking the imperfection of the form of their body? we see that mirror is very important for women, they use it to see how they look or how they should look like. Women pay attention to every detail that has a connection to their face and body, they are worry about their beauty, they want to be perfect in the eyes of men. According to Berger, behind this glace, there is judgments. Even today, this old European art still affects the society where we are living. In our daily life we see that women are more interested to their beauty than men.

1.According to this episode, John Berger explains that to be naked is to be oneself and to be nude is to be seen naked by others which is not recogonized for oneself.  In Berger’s view of it, he emphasizes the initiative of being naked and being nude totally depends on other people. His opinion about the difference between nakedness and nude is kind of different from Kenneth Clark which makes us have deeper understanding of those old European oil paintings.

2.In this video, we can see the majority of male roles in those paintings are dressed. On the contrary, almost all of them are naked or forced to be naked. Men get huge pleasure from those beautiful and sexy women’s bodies. For those male viewers, women are a kind of attractive artwork but not the real individuals. The criteria for a man to judge a woman is pretty face and good figure. I think that is so superficial. However, this outdated view on women still influence people deeply. Nowadays, some people still hold the view that the value of women is to please men rather than realize their own value in life. So hundreds and thousands women can’t get the equal rights with men. They are restricted from going out to work. Even some of them get jobs due to their excellent abilities, they are still discriminated against at work.

3.According to Berger, the significance of the mirror in those paintings is to show the women’s vanity. All of those paintings convey the same concept to us that the beauty of women is defined by male. The female characters in paintings need to cater men’s tastes. So the gaze of them is out of the frame and towards those male viewers which seems that they are seducing them. Except for their gaze, there is anohter important point we should notice is that all of those nudes don’t draw the hair on women’s bodies. Because hair will reduce the sexuality of male sepectators. As I said in question #2, all of these arrangement is to please male. Additional, a female interviewee appeared in the second half of the video mentions that women lose their dynamism as well as their own activities. They are always waiting for the reactions from men.

Q1. Nudity and nakedness do not wear clothes in some sense. However, according to Berger in the video, he has a different opinion. When people are naked, the naked body becomes nude. Nudity is a way of showing naked body. Naked is a person without clothes. In the video, this is important because it implies how people should understand the different relationships between men and women in society in these bare paintings.

Q2. Male nudity represents victory, glory and power, while female nudity is a symbol of fertility, reproduction and sexuality. It exposes social inequality between men and women. Women are used for viewing and are regarded as objects. women are watched by men, so women are always paying attention to their own behavior and appearance. Women are seen as a landscape or object in the painting, and the viewer is the owner of the painting which means women belong to them. In today’s society, these situations still exist. In some families, women still play housewives, and then men make money to support their families. Women belong to men, and men occupy women in these families.

Q3. Mirrors appear in many nude paintings, and it is common for women to use mirrors in Western oil paintings. The appearance of the mirror is to show the vanity of women. a woman cares a lot about whether she is beautiful, so she always sees how she looks in a man’s eyes, whether a woman’s face and body meet the standards of a man. Women satisfy themselves by satisfying men。This mirror also means that in addition to men judging women, women are also judging themselves. At the same time, he connects the gazes of these women with some pornographic magazines. This gaze is like a temptation that tempts people to produce Unlimited reverie. 

Question 1:

According to Berger, nakedness means someone without clothes and it could be recognized, but  nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized by oneself .Besides , he also mentions that a nude has to be seen as an object.Honestly , I don’t realize they have different meanings before watching this video , but I do now.It’s quite significant to distinguish the meanings of  these two words because they are totally different with each other.We usually use the word “naked” to state somebody’s status , it’s more like an objective description. However , when we use the “word” nude to describe a person , it probably means that person is naked for particular reason .Therefore , I suppose “nude” contains deeper meanings on the base of “nakedness”.

Question 2:

Due to the huge influence of the story of Adam and Eve among western countries, western works firstly depicted and defined men as the agent of god and women were servants of men .Hence, during a very long time since then , men were always portrayed as strong ,majestic and powerful.On the other hand , women were more like objects that could appeal men.In many old European oil paintings would depict and emphasize women’s beauty and nude body only because it could attract more men to look at these paintings.As a result , these depictions really influenced the ways we think of men’s role and women’ role even on today.Nowadays,there are still many people have the thought that husband should take whole responsibility to the family such as making money and making decision, what wife should do is taking good care of children at home and obeying their husband’s order.Fortunately, this unequal relationship between men and women has changed since the one hundred years ago , and more and more  females aware that they can have the same rights and status as males.

Question 3:

Berger describes that a mirror could make women realize how they look like and how they would be judge by men .Gradually , mirror became a symbol of vanity to women and the define of beauty changed, it became a competition among women by how men judged them . Berger also states that the reason why women were depicted as naked is not because they would like to be naked ,it’s because they were charming subjects which could satisfy males’ sexual gaze.However , according to Berger’s interview , they don’t think those old European oil paintings have many connections with women today because they are immensely exaggerated and hard to identify.