Male Gaze

Augusto Costa

Introduction: This is a research about Male Gaze. Laura Mulvey proposed the male gaze theory in a paper called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. She defends that Hollywood utilizes women to please the male audience through objectification and identification, derived from scopophilia - the pleasure obtained by gazing - and desires related to Freudian ego. She calls this phenomenon “male gaze”. Mulvey states that in mainstream media, the presence of women is exclusively for display, and objectified without regard for the gender of the audience. In this research, we analyze the history, effects, counter arguments, implications and variations of this form of objectification of women. With the rise of raunch culture, many scholars claim that women are using sexuality to empower themselves, whereas many posit otherwise. The discussion ranges from the real implications of the male gaze and the sexual objectification of women to the factors of causality of this phenomenon. Many also debate whether sexualization of women increased or decreased after the sexual liberation of women, wherein their sexual freedom was established. Moreover, it is discussed in the veracity of the male gaze theory as proposed by Laura Mulvey, and if it still applies to current Hollywood’s mainstream media. There is a great multitude of alternative theories proposed, such as the curious spectator or the matrixial gaze. Among the gazes, another case briefly presented is the reversed male gaze, to shine a line on the discussion of the future tendencies of the sexual objectification in western culture.