British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey studied how female characters are depicted in horror films, coining the term the ‘male gaze’, in her 1975 book ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. This refers to the idea that women are positioned an the ‘object’ of a heterosexual male desire. The concept is based around the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, claiming that film (specifically horror in this case) offers the opportunity for sexual objectification through the patriarchal order of society, claiming ‘the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking’.
Mulvey explains in her book how there are three ‘looks’ or perspectives which sexually objectify women. The first is perspective of the male character and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. Finally, the third perspective joins the former two ‘looks’ together, it is the male audience member’s perspective of the male character in the film. This allows the male audience can relate to himself through looking to the male character in the film.
She calls for a destruction of the contemporary film structure as the only way to get rid of female sexual objectification in film. Removing voyeurism from film will create a necessary distance between the male spectator and the female character. concluding, she suggests that it is women who exist to define the patriarchal society because without women for comparison; a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification. Context heavily influences Mulvey’s viewpoint, as her book “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was written during the period of second-wave feminism. This is a time where sexual objectification and exploitation was heavily explored and criticized, so such views can influence her argument and how she perceived women in film.