An excerpt from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing –
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across the room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking and weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
An so she comes to consider the surveryor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
(Page 46)
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
(Page 47)
Multiple Identities of a Face 