Male gaze

The male gaze is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure. The phrase male gaze was coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975.

The male gaze consists of three perspectives:

The concept was first developed by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey posits that gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses. The concept has subsequently been prominent in feminist film theory, media studies, as well as communications and cultural studies. This term can also be linked to models of voyeurism, scopophilia, and narcissism.

The male gaze occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman's body, for instance. The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object both for the characters within the film and for the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of "patriarchal" order, and it is often seen in "illusionistic narrative film". Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry.

This inequality can be attributed to patriarchy which has been defined as a social ideology embedded in the belief systems of Western culture and in patriarchal societies. It is either masculine individuals or institutions created by these individuals that exert the power to determine what is considered "natural". Over the course of time, these constructed beliefs begin to seem "natural" or "normal" because they are prevalent and carry out unchallenged, thus arguing that Western culture has adopted a dyadic, hierarchical ideology which sets masculinity in binary opposition to femininity thus creating levels of inferiority.

Mulvey describes its two central forms that are based in Freud’s concept of scopophilia, as: "pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism in extremis) and scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of ideal egos)", in order to demonstrate how women have historically been forced to view film through the "male gaze". This theory inevitably reinforces the presence of hegemonic ideologies that dominate our political and social contexts. It also suggests that the male gaze denies women their human identity, relegating them to the status of objects to be admired for physical appearance and male sexual desires and fantasies.

...
Wikipedia