The male gaze – Laura Mulvey and John Berger
This is a key idea of feminist film theory, which visual media believed that men tends to sexualise women for a male viewer. The male gaze theory is when women in the media are portrayed from the eyes of a heterosexual man and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. This suggests that the female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, with the male. John Berger observed that by no means been overcome, men act and woman appear. Men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at.
Quotes
- “It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.”
- “Woman’s desire is subjugated to her image (…) as bearer, not maker, of meaning.”
- “In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”
- ” I still see storytelling for men by men that is always reinforcing the male gaze“
- “Sheer male interest filled his gaze which was entirely focused on her. She’d never before felt so female, so utterly desirable, so wanton.”
- “The “male gaze,” as a shaper of my life’s choices, is largely incidental.”
- “There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”
- “The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.”