Male Gaze

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MALE GAZE to a deep-seated drive known as

“scopophilia”: the sexual pleasure


The “gaze” is a term that describes involved in looking. Mulvey argued
how viewers engage with visual that most popular movies are filmed
media. Originating in film theory in ways that satisfy masculine
and criticism in the 1970s, the gaze scopophilia.
refers to how we look at visual
representations. These include ad- Although sometimes described as
vertisements, television programs the “male gaze”, Mulvey’s concept
and cinema. is more accurately described as a
heterosexual, masculine gaze.
The male gaze describes a way of
portraying and looking at women Visual media that respond to
that empowers men while masculine voyeurism tends to
sexualizing and diminishing women. sexualise women for a male viewer.
While biologically, from early As Mulvey wrote, women are
adolescence on, we are driven to characterised by their “to-be-looked-
look at and evaluate each other as at-ness” in cinema. Woman is
potential mates, the male gaze twists “spectacle”, and man is “the bearer
this natural urge, turning the women of the look”.
into passive items to possess and use
as props. The Postman Always Rings
Twice (1946) offers a famous
The “male gaze” invokes the sexual example of the male gaze. In the
politics of the gaze and suggests a scene below, the audience is
sexualised way of looking that introduced to Cora Smith, the film’s
empowers men and objectifies lead female character. Using close-
women. In the male gaze, woman is ups, the camera forces the viewer to
visually positioned as an “object” of stare at Cora’s body. It creates a
heterosexual male desire. Her mode of looking that is sexual,
feelings, thoughts and her own voyeuristic, and associated with the
sexual drives are less important than male protagonist’s point-of-view.
her being “framed” by male desire.
It also establishes some important
A key idea of feminist film theory, plot points: that the hero desires
the concept of the male gaze was Cora, and that Cora recognises his
introduced by scholar and lust. But the strongest message is
filmmaker Laura Mulvey in her now that Cora is sexy. Indeed, the viewer
famous 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure learns that Cora is sexy before they
and Narrative Cinema. even learn her name. Even if a
viewer isn’t attracted to women in
Adopting the language of “real life”, the scene still makes
psychoanalysis, Mulvey argued that sense. A lifetime of seeing women
traditional Hollywood films respond
sexualised in television, music Rises (2012) has significant personal
videos and advertisements has made motivations, yet she is still clearly
us very comfortable with assuming there to be looked at.
the male gaze.
Source :
The male gaze takes many forms,
but can be identified by situations  https://theconversation.com/e
where female characters are xplainer-what-does-the-male-
controlled by, and mostly exist in gaze-mean-and-what-about-a-
terms of what they represent to, the female-gaze-52486
hero. As Budd Boetticher, who  Szczuka JM, Krämer
directed classic Westerns during the NC. There's More to
1950s, put it: Humanity Than Meets the
Eye: Differences in Gaze
“What counts is what the heroine Behavior Toward Women and
provokes, or rather what she Gynoid Robots. Front
represents. She is the one, or rather Psychol. 2019;10:693.
the love or fear she inspires in the Published 2019 Apr 24.
hero, or else the concern he feels for doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0069
her, who makes him act the way he 3
does. In herself the woman has not
the slightest importance.”

This can be see in the different ways


the camera repeatedly positions us to
look at women’s bodies. Think
of Rear Win-dow (1954), for a
literal framing of women’s bodies,
or She’s All That (1999), which
revolves around a make-over. For a
modern example,
the Transformers film series (2006-
2014) presents women as sexual
objects to be desired.

Filmmakers often attempt to avoid


presenting female characters as
“mere” sexual objects by giving
them complex back stories, strong
motivations and an active role in the
plot of their story. Yet the masculine
gaze is still commonplace.
Catwoman in The Dark Knight

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