The male gaze is how a straight man feels empowered by objectifying and sexualising women in general and in media platforms.

Laura Mulvey created the idea of the so called ‘male gaze’ and revealed the amount of sexualisation women were getting. Then also presumed all men who play these games are only interested in seeing the sexualised version of a woman.

John Berger is well known for his piece of writing “Ways of seeing” which had many feminists viewing it around the male gaze.

John Berger sight of seeing

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.”

This is proving women are objectified and overly sexualised. Video games have proved the male gaze influenced how women are treated and looked at.

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“don’t look like they’re from around here” and appear “dirty.”

“Asian women perpetuates the stereotype that they are meek, submissive, sexual objects who exist purely for men’s entertainment.”

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 “As a girl growing up playing games I was always like, why do I have to play as a boy?”

“If we can show just one of them that they can be accepted anywhere – in both gaming and in the real, working world – and that gaming is not just about being super gender- or sexually conforming, then all the months of work is worth it. That’s why it’s important.”

Laura Mulvey- Visual pleasure and narrative cinema

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.”

“The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly.

• The male gaze is a part of representation of female characters in not only video games, but other forms of media too.
• The male gaze is a masculine, heterosexual point of view that bestows women as sexual objects solely for the pleasure of the straight male.
• John Peter Berger – An English art critic who wrote the book “Ways of Seeing” which was a book that created the idea of the male gaze.
• Laura Mulvey – She is mainly known for her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in her book named “Screen” which further explored the idea of the male gaze and the male perspective in film and cinema.

• The Male Gaze – This is the representation of women in video games or any form of media, over sexualising them for the male attention, this also presumes that the viewer/player is a straight male.
• John Peter Berger – Is an English art critic who wrote the book “Ways of seeing” which introduced the idea of The Male Gaze to the world.
• Laura Mulvey – Is a British film critic who focuses of the feministic views on the obvious male drive in films. She is most well known from her journal “Screen” where a specific essay speaks about the “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which focuses on Johns idea of THE MALE GAZE within cinema.

Examples of the male gaze within films:

This comes from the Transformers film where, as you can see, they oversexualise the actor Megan Fox with the angle of the camera and her body language.

The male gaze: The term came about in 1975 by Laura Mulvey and how the media represents women in magazines , films and video games to make it more appealing to heterosexual males.

From wearing revealing clothes showing much skin as possible , camera angles and the way females move. The male gaze sexualises and objectifies the women’s body whilst when males are represented in media they are mainly covered for example video games will do their best to cover the males body and present him as a fearless warrior. Or at other times when they are shirtless it is representing them as strong and fearless.

Laura Mulvey: Laura Mulvey is a feminist best known for her media theory ‘The male gaze’ in one of her quotes “the 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 male gaze refers to the sexualized interpretation of the gaze in a way that sexualizes/objectifies women and empowers men. In terms of the male gaze, women are often positioned as the object of a generally straight male desire- which is exactly what John Berger mentions in his book Ways of Seeing. Film theorist Laura Mulvey also theorises that most films and movies are filmed in ways that satisfy male voyeurism, which is the sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity which is also known as scopophilia.

‘The Male Gaze’ is a feminist ideology that encapsulates the theory that female characters in visual arts and literature are often over-sexualised and presented solely as sexual objects for heterosexual male gratification from a masculine viewpoint (or gaze).

Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film critic, created the term ‘The Male Gaze’ is her 1973 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Mulvey studied at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and is now a professor at the University of London, specialising in Film and Media Studies. She uses the phycological idea of ‘Scopophilia’, meaning to have ‘aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or person’, as a basis for many of her theories.

John Berger was an English art critic who won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel ‘G.’. He is most well known for his essay ‘Ways of Seeing’. This essay explores The Male Gaze in different ways and puts emphasis on the different ways in which male and female characters are depicted in the media.