The Male Gaze

'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' - Jonathan Schroeder (1998)

It is regularly questioned as to why women are presented sexually within the media, especially focusing on TV and films, which can have a negative affect on women, due to the way they are being portrayed, as it sending the wrong message across in relation to femininity.
We researched this particular issue in class, and found out that this is in fact called 'The Male Gaze Theory.' Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist, who wrote a very influential essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in 1975, in which she used the theories of Freud, a famous philosopher. Within this particular essay, Mulvey suggests that the way women are viewed in cinema is 'unequal.' the camera necessarily presents women as 'sexualised', for the pleasure of men.
Mulvey has three types of 'looking,' which is shown in the diagram below.

'The presence of women is an indispensable element of spectacles in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a storyline, to freeze the flow of action in moment of erotic contemplation.' 


This theory clearly illustrates why women are depicted sexually, which makes the stereotype more noticeable. As an audience, we are more focused on females, as they appear to be more vulnerable, regardless of the fact that their body may be on show, due to them wearing revealing clothes. Therefore, this entices the male population to an extent, which could be one of the reasons they enjoy watching movies, especially action or horror, as these types of genre do consist of a stereotypical woman, in a sexual manner.