Lucyann Mortimore: The male gaze

The male gaze (Laura Mulvey)

The concept of gaze is one that deals with how an audience views the people presented. For feminists it can be thought of in 3 ways;
1) How men look at women
2) How women look at men
3) How women look at other women

Laura Mulvey believes that in film, audiences have to 'view' characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male.

Features of the male gaze
The camera lingers on the curves of the female body and events which occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. The male gaze relegates women to the status of objects. The female viewers must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male.

We were then asked to watch closely at the music video 'She's so lovely' by Scouting for Girls. Once the video was finished we were asked a number of questions;

1) What colour top was he and she wearing?
2)What bowling alley was used?
3)What colour belt did she wear?
4)What colour shoes did they wear?

When asked to answer these questions we found the majority of females in the class had got these questions right and the males had got a lot of these questions wrong. This was the results that would be expected as the woman in the video was distracting to the heterosexual male. This was supporting the male gaze theory to prove it was correct.