The male gaze is how women are objectified. The ‘male gaze’ is women looked at as sexual objects which make men feel empowered.

Laura Mulvey was a British film theorist who tackled the centrality of the male viewer and his pleasure. She called this ‘The Male Gaze’. She wrote ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ which showed all her findings and opinions.

John Peter Berger was known for his ‘Ways of Seeing’ This highlighted ‘The Male Gaze’.

For my video game cover that I have created is avoids the stereotypes of women in video games. The game is aimed for teenagers who are 16+ because of mild fantasy violence, mild language and suggestive themes. In the game a young female named Alice was captured by a gang of criminals but she finds away to escape. The game is based about surviving in the wilderness. From exploring temples to diving into to the deepest seas to fairies helping you through the enchanted forests. The character wears something a bit revealing but isn’t sexualised like most games. My idea of the game was to do something radical where the female isn’t the damsel in distress in this game and holding weapons that mostly male characters are seen holding in video games because they are know to be stereotypically strong.

The reason why I chose to do a female character instead of a male character is because most females in media are represented sexually to give satisfaction to the heterosexual male player. Most games enlarge the females breasts and butt and position them in an awkward angle, wearing tight or short clothing, my game I didn’t enlarge the breasts or butt to sexualise the character.

I think this is a positive game representation because my character is a strong independent female character which I haven’t over sexualized her. The female representation in my game game perfectly fits in with feminine frequency and Toril Mois analysis between female, feminine and feminist categories.

MALE GAZE – The male gaze is depicting women and the world, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.

VOYEURISM – The practice of gaining sexual pleasure from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.

PATRIACHY – a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.

POSITIVE STEREOTYPE –  encourages a certain attitude on how we see things and how things are accepted

NEGATIVE STEREOTYPE –  encourages a certain attitude on how we see things and how things are not accepted.

COUNTER – TYPES – a representation that highlights the positive features of a person or group.

MISREPRESENTATION – False claims or ideas about how people are represented. This can give the wrong idea about someone.

SELECTIVE REPRESENTATION – When groups or people are selected to important positions and represent the majority.

DOMINATNT IDEOLOGY –  values and beliefs in a group or social majority.

CONSTRUCTED REALITY – the way we present ourselves to other people is shaped partly by our interactions with others, as well as by our life experiences.

HEGEMONY – Leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others.

AUDEIENCE POSTIONING – Audience positioning refers to the techniques used by the creator of a text to try to get the audience to understand the ideology of the text.

NEGORIATED IDENTITY –  refers to the processes through which perceivers come to agreements regarding the identities that targets are to assume in the interaction.

COLLECITVE IDENTITY – refers to all the affective aspects deriving from belonging to certain groups with which adolescents identify themselves and which place them within certain social categories such as ethnicity, nationality, or gender.

FLUIDITY OF IDENTITY – Having a fluid identity means having the ability to change how you see yourself, the world, and your actions.

CONSTRUCTED IDENTITY – individuals’ sense of belonging to a group.

Male gaze – refers to the way in which women are typically presented in media often through the eyes of the straight male.

Voyeurism – specifies a conduct of someone who is engrossed in prying on the personal affairs and lifestyles of other individuals.

Patriarchy – male dominated society.

Positive stereotypes – subjectively favourable belief held about a social group.

Negative stereotypes – subjectively unfavourable belief held about a social group.

Counter-types – a representation that highlights the positive features of a person or group.

Misrepresentation – to represent something incorrectly or improperly often due to a sense of prejudice.

Selective representation – to only show/represent part of an event, ideology, topic, individual where the representation is often chosen based on importance, proximity to home and viewer preference.

Dominant ideology – values, beliefs and morals shared by the social majority, which frames how most of the population act.

Constructed reality – selection of events or issues to be covered and also the the decision making of how they are defined and interpreted – when media reality begins to impose itself onto real life.

Hegemony – the dominance of certain aspects of life and thought by the penetration of a dominant culture and its values into social life – a crucial shaper of culture, values and society.

Audience positioning – relationships between the audience and the text, how an audience receives, reads and responds to a text.

Fluidity of identity – an identity that has the potential to be changed and shaped frequently in many directions.

This is often due to different representations of men and women in media and as a result people find themselves adapting and changing their identity’s in order to reciprocate said representations they are exposed to.

Constructed identity – an identity that has been built upon experiences, relationships and connections. A persons identity will differ depending on:

• where they’ve been brought up
• how they have been brought up
• who they have been brought up with
• their financial state and/or social class
• a persons faith
• life experience

The list if different influences is endless and each factor can also be affected by one another.

Negotiated identity – the process of which people reach an agreement of their identity and well as their relationships with other people’s identities – once the agreement is established, people are expected to remain faithful to their identity.

This establishes what people can expect from one another and therefore reinforces the inter-relations that holds relationships together.

Collective identity – cognitive and affective attained from belonging to certain groups (ethnic, gender, class, sexual orientation ect…) creating a sense of belonging to that group for the individual.

It seems that if someone begins to reciprocate certain practices of a group, such as they way they dress, their mannerisms etc, they will become part of that persons own individual identity and will develop a sense of belonging within that group. This can sometimes take over other aspects of a persons individual identity.

How women are sexualised in video games, it largely remains unclear whether sexualized video games can have an impact on attitudes toward women. Often game designers change the camera angles to sexualise the female characters body shape and extenuate their walk to show off their purposefully widened hips. They also advertise the game covers with the female characters contorted in ways which can show off their whole body, they do this to appeal to men which entices them to buy the game. Laura was the women who came up with the idea about the male gaze as they were many issues with gender in film and other media. She is a feminist and says that films are made in the view of a heterosexual men trying to sexualise a woman by camera angles, zoom-ins or other strategies. John Berger devised the theory called “Ways of seeing” suggesting that the way woman are seen by men and the way they are taught to see themselves is wrong and creates a bad relationship between the two genders.