The Male Gaze Theory - Laura Mulvey

Hello!
I always had a burning desire to know why females are presented in a particular way during films; I wondered if there was a type of theory  that described why they are depicted as they are and luckily in class we had the opportunity to explore the male gaze theory. This theory basically states that women are conveyed in a way for example with short skirts or a view of the cleavage etc for the entertainment and eyes of males.

Laura Mulvey wrote a very influential essay which was called "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975). Using the theories of Sigmund Freud (a famous philospher) and Lacan, Mulvey suggests that the way women are viewed in cinema in "unequal" when compared to the status of the male. The camera unnecessarily presents women as "sexualised" for the pleasure of the men. She once said that " the preserve of woman is indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual prescense tends to work against the development of the story-line to freeze the flow of action  in moment of erotic contemplation."

Mulvey's three types of "looking" (or formally known as voyeurism):



A way to remember this is that 1. is focusing on the camera, 2. is focusing on the audience and 3. is focusing on the characters.