Thus, female nakedness in this tradition is never an expression of the woman's own desires, but a submission to the spectator's. But what prize do they win? According to Berger, the prize is 'to be owned'-i.e., to be immortalized in a painting which a male owner will be able to enjoy. The painting's subject is a competition between women, vying to be recognized by a man as the most beautiful.

This belief carries over to later paintings like The Judgement of Paris, where Helen of Troy is deemed the most beautiful woman in the world. But the symbolic mirror nevertheless served to reinforce that women should be treated (and treat themselves) primarily as sights to be regarded. Paradoxically, mirrors in such paintings often symbolized women's vanity-allowing painters to condemn the so-called 'vanity' of female subjects that they painted in the nude for the sake of their own pleasure. The theme of the work is the act of looking at a nude woman. Sometimes, as in Tinoretto's Sisannah and the Elders, this is the subject of the painting: the woman looks at herself in a mirror, just as the spectator looks at her in the painting. Even as nude oil painting grew more secular, female subjects continued to be defined by their awareness of the spectator. From the earliest nude paintings, often featuring Adam and Eve, a woman's nakedness was constituted by her relationship to the viewer: she either performs shame and modesty, or exhibits herself proudly-but never exists as simply naked and unaware she is being looked at. This relationship is especially perceptible in a certain tradition of European oil painting that often depicted nude female figures.

To simplify this, Berger offers the following paradigm: ' men act and women appear.' While men do the looking, women watch themselves being looked at. As a result, women are forced to survey themselves constantly, conscious of the fact that their tastes, values, and personalities will be judged by male viewers on the grounds of their outward appearance. In both life and art, social convention dictates that men and women are perceived differently: men project a capacity for power that reaches outside of their own body, whereas women's entire being is thought to reside in their physical appearance.

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