Laura Mulvey's The Male Gaze

The theory:

The term 'male gaze' derived from an essay (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema) written by Laura Mulvey in 1975, a feminist film critic who studied at Oxford and is now a professor at Birbeck University for screen theory.

This theory of the male gaze suggests that media texts regard the audience to mostly be heterosexual male. In other cases where this may not be true the theory still applies, as the method of objectifying women will attract this male audience. The media text is presented from a point of view of this male, so they see what would appeal to them. The female characters hold no value to themselves but are there for the male's needs, and their presence in media texts is in relation to the male's.



The theory revolves around the idea that women are stripped of their human identity and are rather seen as objects of desire, and this can be done via many methods of camera work.These include panning across a women's body, cutaways and even zooming or close ups that can be seen as appealing to a male audience. As for the female audience, they get the secondary perspective and often find themselves consuming media texts from this male view. To support this theory, only 16% of media creators are female, which indicates that it is these male creators that saturate the industry with texts that contribute to the male gaze.

Mulvey suggested that women have two purposes in a media text:

1. To be an erotic object for characters within the narrative to view.
2. To be an erotic object for spectators outside the narrative to view.

Gender Roles:
Men are seen to have an active role in media texts due to being this spectator that observes other people. They are the ones that push the narrative forwards by making actions/events occur. The female characters on the other hand are seen as passive as they are there to be looked at. They also slow the narrative down due to being inspiration for men to act upon.

This theory can result in the idea of this hegemonic society, in which men are dominant due to saturating this industry with the portrayal of women of objects of desire and pleasure. This is rarely seen being the other way round, as women consume these texts either way whether they are the secondary perspective or not.


Example:
An example music video that supports this theory is Dear Maria Count Me In by All Time Low. The location for this song is a club in which they have a woman dancing for them, and many close up are featured of her legs and body as she dances. She is also commonly seen facing the camera many times, and there are panning shots and cutaways featuring her too. This supports the theory in which this character is there for the two purposes of being an object for both the characters and the spectators.

I could use this theory in my own music video as my artist is female, however my this wouldn't be appropriate for my target audience who will be teenagers, mostly female themselves.