‘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.
Feminist film expert, Laura Mulvey, invented the concept of women being looked at in a very sexualised way by males in order to make them feel important and better about themselves, objectifying them. This is called The Male Gaze- the way in which men look at women in a sexualising way.
John Berger:
John Berger was an English Art Critic who wrote the famous essay ‘Ways of Seeing’. This essay includes ideas of the different ways men and women are represented in visual media, and Laura Mulvey’s concept of The Male Gaze.
“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.” – Ways of Seeing
The male gaze is an objectification of women. The ‘gaze’ is looked at as sexualising women and objectifying them and empowering men, not just in video games but in general media platforms. The game makers use women more as a sexual object used for appeal unlike male characters who are built to have a personality, talents and appropriate outfits. Women’s representation in games focuses more on their boobs and butt and outfit than their object which is to win the game.
Laura Mulvey, is a feminist who explains that most films are designed to visually pleasure masculine ‘scopophilia’. Scopophilia is the sexual pleasure in looking. Her concept is described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze. Mulvey explains that men are uninterested in women if not sexualised in some way, either in their outfits or exaggerated features, in video games and movies. She explains men feel power over women when they are venerable in media, by wearing sexualised outfits.
John Berger– He devised the theory of “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.
DEADLINE TO COMPLETE YOUR GAMES COVER IS TUESDAY 5th OCTOBER
Think about what you would produce as a video games box inlay product and write up the following in a new post (which is linked to the NEA assessment criteria – click on file link below to see how you will be assessed)
4. What kind of company would make your product? What kind of audience would consume it? (50-100 words)
Task 2:
Sketch out a design for your games cover on an A4 piece of paper. Take a photo of your sketch and upload this to your blog (essentially both task 1 and task 2 are your planning documents).
Task 3:
Create a DVD games box cover (back and front). The dimensions are 275 mm x 185 mm with a 300 dpi resolution (because this is essentially a print product). Include spine guides, the first at left is at 130 mm add a second guide to have a spine of 15 mm.
Task 4:
Please upload your finished product to the blog (as a JPEG) and print it out on a piece of A4 paper. Do this by the end of the week. Categorise your post as PRODUCTION.
If your JPEG is too big to upload then open up the file in Photoshop and reduce the file size. You can do that by selecting IMAGE > IMAGE SIZE and REDUCING THE BIGGEST NUMBER TO 1000 PIXELS.
Task 5:
Re-design your Game Cover / Inlay box card to produce a completely opposite representation of your product. So if it was reactionary, make it radical, if it was positive make it negative, if it was stereotypical make it countertypical. Please remember that we are a school – so don’t go too controversial – it would still need to be a recognisable media product that is aimed to sale.
Some advice for content
In other words, you are looking to change more than the surface of your product! At the heart of your product you are (RE)-PRESENTING A SET OF ATTITUDES, VALUES, BELIEFS (what is known as ideology), so your new product will be a complete reversal (or antithesis) of your first production.
In this way, we should be able to recognise that media products are a set of selected elements that construct an ideological representation of ( . . a thing, a group, a set of . . . for example: gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, regional identity, economic identity, global identity and / or ideas around key issues such as the environment, conflict, violence, space, morality, ethics etc etc etc)
Some advice for the process
I would suggest that you open up your old file and save it as a new file name. I would imagine that you will:
Change the colour scheme
Change the title
Change your main character
Adjust and change a couple of your screen grabs
When you have finished upload the JPEG copy to the blog (as we know PSD – photoshop files do not upload to the blog)
I will give you a mark out of 10.
5 points for completing the exercise.
5 points for each bullet point that shows the changes you have made.
The male gaze– How men objectify (view) women and sexualizing’s them as being less capable creating empowerment in men.
Laura Mulvey– She was the person 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 reveal sexually attractive parts of a woman by camera angles, zoom-ins or other strategies.
John Berger– He devised the theory of “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.
Quotes
“52% of Hispanic people studied believed there was a link between violent video games and real-world violence.”
“This poor representation of Asian women perpetuates the stereotype that they are meek, submissive, sexual objects who exist purely for men’s entertainment.”
“new range of diverse player avatars, complete with wheelchairs, complete with a greater range of skin tones, complete with more expressive gender-agnostic clothing”
“It is isolating not to be thought of or considered in the culture you desperately want to consume and be part of.”
“women then stands in patriarchal couture as signifier for the male other”
“women displayed as a sexual object”
“Euthanised damsel- only solution is to kill damsel in order to protect her”
“Woman in refrigerator- women killed off to continue male story development and seek revenge”
The Male Gaze – the perspective of a notionally typical heterosexual man considered as embodied in the audience or intended audience for films and other visual media, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women. “it’s because of the male gaze that female characters are regularly eroticized.”
(Source – Oxford Languages)
Laura Mulvey– a filmmaker and theorist who created the term “the male gaze” in her 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
John Berger– an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. In his book Ways of Seeing, Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have no means been overcome – men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’.
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’
Megan Fox in Transformers
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.
It is pronounced, that ‘the male gaze’ is a common stereotype followed in different forms of the media. Laura Mulvey argues that some of the moist popular films follow a ‘deep-seated drive’ known as ‘scopophilia’. This idea can be seen in sexualising for the male viewer, in way to make the vision more interesting and appealing. Examples of this sexualization can include close ups of the detailed body of the character, or minimal clothing dressed on the character. Camera positions are a common aspect of emphasising the feminine body, a zoom and easy accessibility of vision into the more exaggerated areas of a female body during cut scenes and/or during gameplay compared to the avoidable recognition of a the male body, causes concern. It is not argued against that women aren’t seen as heroic or adventurous in these films or videogames, however how they are seen conducting their actions, through what they wear, how they walk, how they sound etc, is where the offence becomes apparent. Furthermore, it is unusual to see men objectified as a sexual object, Laura Mulvey states, so why should women be seen as this? Are these women desired for their audaciousness during film/gameplay due to what they look like?
The male gaze is an objectification of and towards women. The ‘gaze’ is looked at as sexualising women and objectifying them and empowering men, to indicate that females feelings and thoughts are less important than women being ‘framed’ by male desire.
Laura Mulvey, is a feminist who explains that most films are designed to visually pleasure masculine ‘scopophilia’. Scopophilia is the sexual pleasure in looking. Her concept is described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze. She argues the disliking of women being sexualised by their body language and fashion in most movies, and how women are there to be a visual pleasure for men.
the male gaze is the perspective of a heterosexual man and how it is used to create the feeling of empowerment in men and the objectification and sexualisation of women in video games, films and other media.
Laura Mulvey–
is a creator who works on explaining and exposing why the male gaze is so overused in games and how it is used. for example she talks about how the camera angles are used differently for male and female characters. for example male characters have a more over the shoulder camera angle in 3rd person games where as woman’s camera angles focus of getting the woman’s entire body in the shot. she also talks about how little clothing the female characters wear and how the heals they where bare inappropriate for fighting and are only used for the sexualisation of the character.
John Berger–
“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 shows how he too agrees that women are over sexualised and how the male gaze effectively objectifies the woman and how they are treated by men as something to look at and sexualise. aso woman start to feel as though they are just an object as the male gaze is such a prominent thing in current media such as video games.
Pithy quotes.
“It sets a dangerous precedent when game developers don’t do their research.”
“a link between violent video games and real-world violence.”
“”young, white, straight male”
” they can be accepted anywhere- in both the gaming world- and that gaming.”
