The Male Gaze –
Coined by Laura Mulvey in 1975, the term ‘the Male Gaze’ refers to the objectifying of women in popular media. Women are commonly sexualised through the use of clothing, camera angles, and movement, in order to satisfy the presumed heterosexual male viewer. There are many examples of the Male Gaze having an impact on modern media. For instance, extraneous nudity by female characters, slow camera pans of women’s bodies, women wearing tight or informal clothing when male characters are appropriately dressed, framing women so their cleavage stays in the frame, using the female body as a prop, a male protagonist, with women characters only as sexual objects. The problem with the male gaze is that I portray women as something for the heterosexual male (or patriarchal society as a whole) to watch, conquer, and possess, rather than understand and respect. Also, as media is so influential in determining culture, regressive representation of women in video games could make the young men and women playing them a misinformed view of sexual politics.
Ways of Seeing – copied from Wikipedia
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. It was broadcast on BBC Two in January 1972 and adapted into a book of the same name.
The series was intended as a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation TV series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon, and the series and book criticise traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. According to James Bridle, Berger “didn’t just help us gain a new perspective on viewing art with his 1972 series Ways of Seeing – he also revealed much about the world in which we live. Whether exploring the history of the female nude or the status of oil paint, his landmark series showed how art revealed the social and political systems in which it was made. He also examined what had changed in our ways of seeing in the time between when the art was made and today.”
The series has had a lasting influence, and in particular introduced the concept of the male gaze, as part of his analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting. It soon became popular among feminists, including the British film critic Laura Mulvey, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema.
Example of ‘The Male Gaze’
In the 2007 film, Transformers, Megan Fox (who was just 20 years old during filming) is overly sexualised in order to appeal to heterosexual males.