Objectification : When someone is treated as an object who can be owned or possessed by another.
Voyeurism : A perversion in which a person receives sexual gratification from seeing sexual images.
Archetype : Someone whose appearance and behaviour match a stereotype.
Stereotype : A label attached to someone based upon a social factor such as gender, class, ethnicity, culture, religion etc.
Hegemony : Dominance of one state over another social group e.g. men over women.
Laura Mulvey's The Male Gaze (1975) :
1. How men look at women
2. How women look at themselves
3. How women look at other women
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema :
- Women are presented as a sexual spectacle as objects of pleasure for the characters and audience.
- Audiences experience film through the view of a heterosexual male.
- Women are always starting from an 'unequal' beginning.
- The camera present women as sexualised for men's pleasure.
- Men fetishise women which is referred to as 'fetishitistic scopophilia'.
- Men have this gaze to avoid being 'castrated'.
Features of the Male Gaze :
- The camera lingers on the curves of female bodies and women are presented in the context of mens reactions to the events.
- Women are relegated to the status of an object.
- Female viewers experience film narratives secondarily by identification with the male.
Male Gaze in Advertising :
Charlie's Angels Gender Representations :
- Theorists have also noted that the female body is often used in advertising even when it has nothing to do with the product being advertised.
- "to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior the object of the gaze".
Criticisms of Mulvey and The Male Gaze Theory :
- Some women enjoy being looked at such as beauty pageant contestants.
- The gaze is not always used sexually but also to compare body image or clothing etc.
- The theory does not consider female spectators, only heterosexual males.
- Since the 1980s there has been a large increase in the sexualisation of the male body.
Charlie's Angels Gender Representations :
Empowerment:
1. Riding a motorbike
2. Owning a Ferrari
3. Using sexuality as a power mechanism
4. Saving men
5. Fighting men
6. Adrenaline sports
7. Driving a monster truck
8. The women are in an active protagonist role
Sexuality:
1. Promiscuous/ impractical outfits
2. Surfboard innuendoes
3. They have a male boss
4. Strippers pole and stripping
Miriam Hanson's The Female Gaze 1984 :
- A theory that suggests women are also able to sexualise males as erotic objects of desire.
- Since the 1980s there has been a large increase in the sexualisation of the male body.
