The Patriarchal Male Gaze

Scopophilia is defined as the pleasure in looking. There are three kinds of looking in film: characters looking at other characters, cameras looking at the characters, and finally, the audience looking that the screen through the camera. The only way to change how women are viewed in cinema is to disrupt the looking. Through the narrative and technical structure in Stepford Wives (1975), the traditional male gaze is questioned while at the same time the main character, Joanna, is given her own gaze.

Renowned feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, explores how classic Hollywood cinema is shown through a masculine perspective that fetishisizes women as objects of desire. This perspective is also known as the “male gaze”, which creates a voyeuristic and scopophilic layer to the viewing of film. According to Mulvey, “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” One of the staples of classic Hollywood cinema is women consistently being put or made into a visually erotic role for both the male characters on screen, and the audience. This staple is of course found in the

All over the globe, violence and discrimination against women and girls violates their human rights and severely compromised their perception of equality. Culture, false beliefs and ancient traditions, such as early marriage, the nuclear family, gender-based discrimination, which lead to violence against women and femicide, destroyed young girls ' mental and physical wellbeing and self-esteem by supporting the ideas that gender-based discrimination and inequality is acceptable in our societies.

gaze”. This term is used to describe how in society, a woman is trained to think about the way she looks

The gaze deals with how the audience views the people presented in visual culture, in this case, adverts, magazines and Cinema. The ‘male gaze’ is the male ability to exercise control over women by representing them in visual means as passive, sexual objects of male desire. The power of men over women has always existed. They are seen as the more powerful and clever species. This control over women has been seen predominately in linguistics senses in past times. It is clear that there are more derogatory terms for women than there are for men. Men can also wolf whistle or cat-call in order to harass a woman but

It's surprising to see women, who have been judged in our society for many years, mistreating other women for the similar reasons. Someone with traditional views would claim a woman as inappropriate depending on the amount of skin she shows, her body type, or the clothing she chooses to wear. To contrary belief, traditional views influence society's perspective of what is appropriate. This gives "appropriate" women superiority and power to shame girls who naturally cannot abide to society's norms. My bop poem surrounds the restrictions on young females who do not fit society's body normalities. A humiliating experience of mine from Sunday school has inspired me to talk about m restrictions in society. Social media has also educated me to write

As Laura Mulvey states in her article "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema", the cinema operates as an "advanced representation system" that offers pleasure in the act of looking, what she classifies as scopophilia or voyeurism (Mulvey 484). Through the cinematic experience, one may sit in a dark theatre and derive pleasure from looking without being seen. As E. Ann Kaplan describes in the introduction to her book Women and Film, within this act of gazing there are three looks: "(i) within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; (ii) the spectator, in turn is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on screen; and (iii) the camera's original 'gaze' comes into play in the very

A more recent example of the male gaze is exemplified in the Tomb Raider’s main character, Lara Croft.  Albeit Lara is a certified heroine who can shoot, move, and communicate alongside or against and even better than most males, she is stunningly beautiful.  If one were to ask the

Praise for Toomer’s depictions of black sexuality are well-deserved because they are bold and daring in a way that was uncommon prior to the modern era. Traditional literary depictions of women were limited to those that conformed to the values of the cult of womanhood. What Toomer’s women in Cane accomplish is quite the opposite. He employs the male gaze as a tool of humanization, often in critique of the violence executed against the black female body which has been justified for so long by the gaze itself. Toomer works to situate womanhood in reality as opposed to Victorian notions of purity, chastity, and domesticity. He does this by placing black and white womanhood adjacent to each other and offering sexuality and promiscuity as part

Showing your humanity through raw emotions used to be seen as proof of a person’s sincerity, honesty, and integrity. Something happened in the 20th century, women became the picture of teary-eyed fragility and the tearless, aggressive male became the ideal of masculinity. Media messages, commercials, and television shows stopped portraying men as responsible, competent, and compassionate husbands, sons, and fathers, instead they consist of idiotic or misogynistic archetypes. When men are portrayed as sensitive humans, it is largely under the caveat of being gay. As stated in A New Vision of Masculinity, there is still little worse than being mistaken for a homosexual (Cooper, 2016).

Laura Mulvey, the British scholar, she puts forward the film argument combines with psychoanalytic theory and the concept of "male gaze" in her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative”. Mulvey mentions that, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active / male and passive / female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are whisper At and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looking-at-ness.”(p.715) In other words, Hollywood narrative films use women in order to provide a pleasurable visual experience for men. The narrative film structures its gaze as masculine. The woman is always the object of the reifying gaze, not the bearer of it.

The notion of hegemonic masculinity has altered the field of gender studies and many academic arenas. An idea popularized by R.W. Connell, hegemonic masculinity has played an integral role in the emotional development of American men, articulating the impact that this societal construction has had on the concept of American masculinity. It is a contested topic, yet the impacts that it has in terms of sexuality, struggles for power and political leadership, and gender identities are valid (Connell 830). Although difficult to fully achieve, it acts as a guiding force for the stereotypically masculine. Hegemonic masculinity assumes the subordination of all other forms of masculinity, placing it at the top of the social hierarchy. At the same time, the idea of hegemonic masculinity has served as a bridge between the growing field of men’s’ studies and female studies (Connell 829). Several authors share the premise that men in American society conform to the standards of the social construct of hegemonic masculinity.

Theorist, E. Ann Kaplan in her work, “Is the Gaze Male?”, analyses the portrayal of women in film using Laura Mulvey’s “Gaze’ theory and psychoanalysis. In addition, Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes the constraints and limitations that the family places on women, at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as inevitable and normal. Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and “feminine, and dominance-submission patterns. In the end, she concludes that the exclusion from male culture provides an avenue to affect change in film and society. I partially agree with Kaplan that some women take pleasure from being the object of the male gaze as I think that is not entirely true, and specifically, this generalization does not apply to lesbians.

The male gaze puts his fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled, in a unique sort of way. In this traditional exhibitionist, role women are continuously being looked at and their appearance is delivered to the male gaze in such a way as a strong visual and erotic impact and provides male desire. The presence of a woman in a normal narrative film is the key of the movie. However, the key of the narrative film works against the development of the story-line and stops the action due to the erotic gaze. Butt Boetticher said: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance”.

Throughout the course of human history, societies worldwide tend to follow a specific pattern of male domination in politics, economics, and culture. From the earliest city-states of Mesopotamia to the massive empires of China and Rome, women were forced to take a limited role in society. This systematic oppression of women is indicative of a patriarchal society, in which “women have been subordinate to men in the family and in society generally” (Ways of the World 59). Though these civilizations share the characteristic of male supremacy, each had different practices governing interactions between the genders. Each society had a unique idea of exactly what rights women were afforded and how the patriarchy was enforced. The Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Greek civilizations were undeniably patriarchal, but how the dominance of men was expressed varied between each society.