Male gaze

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: (i) that of the man behind the camera, (ii) that of the male characters within the film’s cinematic representations; and (iii) that of the spectator gazing at the image.

The gaze was a concept developed in 20th-century French philosophy. The term “male gaze” was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing, a series of films for the BBC aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his analysis of the treatment of women as objects in advertising and nudes in European painting. It soon became popular among feminists, including the British film critic Laura Mulvey, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema and coined the phrase.

The psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jacques Lacan are foundational in Mulvey’s development of a male gaze theory, as they provide a lens through which Mulvey was able to interpret the “primordial wish for pleasurable looking” satisfied through the cinematic experience.  As a way of seeing women and the world, psychoanalytic theorizations of the male gaze involve Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as scopophilia or the pleasure of looking. The terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic joy and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something.

The male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze.

― Wikipedia