The Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey's theory, "The Male Gaze", focuses on the representation of women as image in film and the mascilination of the spectator. "It investigates the way in which the unconscious patriarchal society has structed film form". Film reflects society's psychological obsessions.

The male gaze refers to the act of looking upon women as objects and adopting the role of spectator, but metaphorically it refers to a way of thinking and acting within society.

Classic Hollywood cinema has traditionally used gender differences as a function of narrative and representational forms. A flaw in the theory is how the research was done before homosexuals were made legal.

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has split between active male and passive female. Mulvey establishes relationship between subject (spectator/protagonist) is related to active male and passive female.

The relationship between audience and protagonist - traditional attitudes to gender- can be reinforced or challenged in a media text.

Mulvey's feminist critique of patriarchal structures: sexual differences in film function to produce pleasure and this pleasure is produced for someone whom Mulvey identifies as male. This social imbalance is maintained both in films and the "real world" outside the film.

Mulvey thought there are a number of possibilites for pleasure in the cinema. The first is what Freud called "scopophilia"= pleasure at looking at another person as an object. The spectator in cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibition- projectional repressed desire onto the female. Mulvey calls this narcicism is passive and developed through identification with the object. Mulvey sees scopophilia as male active and narcicism as female passive.

The spectator's gaze is male in two senses:

1) The gaze is (aimed outwardly) in the direction of women as objects of erotic desire.

2) The gaze (from within) in its identification with the male protagonist.

Mary Deveraux (another theorist) distinguishes between sex which she says is physical, and gender, which she sees as social, and concludes that "the "male gaze" is not always male, but is always male dominated".

Another theorist, Rodowick claims Mulvey's theory glosses over possibilities as hetero and homosexual identities and pleasures, not to mention audience subjectivity defined by class, race and nationality.

Mulvey says men are reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist self. This disregards the issues of sexual preference (this is a weakness to Mulvey's theory- she is denying bisexuality & the "male gaze", i.e. strippers- men would not enjoy going to a strippers club where the strippers are male). Another flaw could be the theory denies influences of race, nationality and sexual orientation.

In relation to our music video production, there is a male dominance, with the animated wolf character and the (only) male actor, representing the main singer from the band.

There is an example of the "male gaze" being shown through Paolo Nutini's "Pencil of Lead" music video, as many times the camera has POV shots, as "the gaze is (aimed outwardly) in the direction of women as objects of erotic desire". It is extremely common in media texts for this to occur, whether as a serious attitude men have (usually the case) or used in a humorous manner, an example being Eminem's "We Made You" music video. A representation of Jennifer Lopez/J-Lo with an over-exaggeration of her womanly and well-known asset. "Dirty" by Christina Aguilera is attending to the "male gaze" theory as she and the other females are shown as a sex object with skimpy costumes, sexy dancing and the behaviour in such a location (club).

Shamefully even Blogger, has allowed a gadget to be made available to bloggers called "Car Wash Girls" which suggested by the name involves three women washing a car.