Male Gaze Analysis

The male gaze is a concept that was first coined by Laura Mulvey, in her book 'Visual and Other Pleasures', in which she suggests that angles and lighting in movies are used to objectify and hyper-sexualise female bodies in order to make them more appealing to male viewers. This concept can also often be applied to artworks, adverts and other imagery that we see in our everyday lives, from adverts talking about obscure things such as cat food, to lingerie and make-up adverts actually aimed at women themselves.
As woman artist Pauline Boty says, 'women's bodies are regulated by the normative culture of masculine privilege and authority'1. Are we really still living in a world where men can control women bodies, how they look and how they should act? Where women are objects and not treated as the intelligent, flexible people that they really are?

We question if much has really changed as a whole for women and the way they are, and have been, looked at by men. It seems as if the male gaze is still an aggressive and prominent part of our culture and media today and something that still has a heavy impact on women.

In this presentation I will be discussing various artist's and writer's views on the male gaze and present my own ideas on the subject as well.

'To be born a
Berger also uses the notion of the 'surveyor and the surveyed'2– the surveyor being the male watching the female, or the female watching herself through the male's eyes, whereas the surveyed is the female, being watched by the male. The notion of 'the surveyor and the surveyed' sounds quite aggressive, almost as if the man is a predatory animal and the woman his prey, being watched, aware of what he wants to do with/to