Effects of the Male Gaze

Ellie Moody (3/3)

(1/3) What Is “The Male Gaze”?

(2/3) Behind The Camera: Female Representation

The media we consume shapes how we view the real world. It’s hard not to internalize the things that movies and popular culture teach us. Laura Mulvey explains how the fourth wall gives the illusion that what we see onscreen is unaltered or manipulated by humans and equipment. It appears natural and true, so we absorb it and begin to view the world (specifically the roles of women) that way. It naturalizes the dynamic of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” (Mulvey 840). This carries over into societal gender roles, and affects how women view themselves. Women have been conditioned by society to constantly perform for male acceptance or to fill a need to be desired, thus perpetuating the patriarchal male gaze within themselves.

Having more women in writing and directing roles would definitely help to bring authentic female representation in films, but even female filmmakers (such as Sofia Coppola) still execute their films to perpetuate male gaze subconsciously. It’s become so internalized, so can we even subvert it? 

The only answer may be social change. 

Ellie Moody (2/3)

(1/3) What Is “The Male Gaze”?

(3/3) How The Male Gaze Affects Our Real-World Perceptions

According to a study done by UCLA’s social sciences division and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 91% of studio heads are white and 82% are male. Senior management is 93% white and 80% male, a slight improvement from 2015, when it was 100% male. 

"Women directors, by contrast, have seen some appreciable growth in the past decade, from 4.1% of all directors in 2011 to a record high of 15.1% in 2019. Women of color, however, were far less well represented, and as Hunt and Ramón state in the study, women as a whole 'remained underrepresented by a factor of more than 3 to 1 in this employment arena in 2019’” (Vary).

"Of all films in the history of cinema, 95 percent have been directed by men—mostly white men. They have shaped everybody’s cinematic visual language. They have chosen which tropes to multiply and reinforce. Most importantly, they have determined which characters get centralized as protagonists and subjects of the stories (mostly white men), whose experiences get marginalized (mostly everyone else’s), and who to turn into the object of the actions, desires, and gaze of those subjects (mostly women—mainly white women)” (McDougall Jones).

Ellie Moody (1/3)

(2/3) Behind The Camera: Female Representation

(3/3) How The Male Gaze Affects Our Real-World Perceptions

“Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the [cinema] auditorium.” -Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

(I will be editing this post to add more of an explanation!)

How can you catch the male gaze in action? When watching a movie, filmmaker and journalist Naomi McDougall Jones challenges you to examine the following:

“What is the POV?”

Who is doing the looking and who is being looked at?

“Is this woman’s body part connected to her head?”

Segmented close-up shots of a woman’s body dehumanize women, as their objectified body parts are disconnected from their faces, therefore disconnected from their feelings and personal identity. Men’s bodies are almost never segmented like this, leaving them full and personified!

“How is this human lit?”

McDougall Jones writes that ‘female characters are almost always front-lit with soft, flat lighting to the point that no lines or specific personal attributes are visible on their faces at all,’ while men are lit and shot to look like regular people. Their unique facial characteristics are made more visible, which helps us to relate to and identify with them as humans and key into their experiences and emotions.

“Wait a minute, why is this woman being sexualized right now?”