The Male/Female Gaze

The Theory of the Male Gaze:

This is a theory by Laura Mulvey, she talked about it in her famous essay called ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (1975) 

In her theory she says that women are viewed unequally in the cinema. The main reason for this being that in many movies women are ‘objectified’ and ‘sexualised’ for the pleasure of men, this is called ‘the male gaze’ and it means that the audience will view the woman from the male perspective.

In her essay she also stated the three types of looking:

1. The way the camera is recording the event 

2. The look of the audience as they watch the final film product 

3.The look of the characters at each other in the visual images of the screen illusion

This is commonly used in the cinema because it is known to bring in a bigger audience and will make the movie more successful, this technique usually has a positive response from the audience. In many horror movies there is a bathroom scene, to do this they use a technique called voyeurism, this is commonly used in horror because it is show the characters vulnerability as this is the one place where you wouldn’t expect someone to attack you.

An Example is in the movie Carrie (1976 and 2013) where the first scene is a shower scene and the shower scene in the movie Psycho (1960).

When this is used in the cinema, the audience is viewing the character from the male perspective and when a woman watches this she doesn't realise it because of how often it's used in the cinema. By using this technique is movies it makes men give women a unrealistic and overvalued status, an example of this is the transformers movie (2007).

The Female Gaze:

There is also a theory called the female gaze which is parallel to the male gaze, but this is when men are shown in movies through a females point of view, but isn’t as commonly used in cinema as the male gaze takes precedence over the female gaze. This is mostly because the movie industry is still mainly controlled by men.

This has become more commonly used in contemporary films such as twilight. Another example is the music video 'call me maybe' by Carly Rae Jensen and a famous Coca - Cola diet ad.