Zorayda's Happiness Book

But in extreme brief, the male gaze was coined by Laura Mulvey in a 1970s feminist critique of film, but it has since been retconned into applying to all realms of visual art. The very basic idea is that throughout Western art, from the Renaissance painters through modern film, television, advertising, videogames, and comic books, there is an unspoken assumption underlying the vast majority of the work that the viewer/reader/consumer/player is male and heterosexual, because the creators have been and are, in the vast majority, male and heterosexual. And if a straight woman or a homosexual man wants to appreciate these works, she or he must at least temporarily assume the perspective of a straight man…

And therein is one particularly insidious assumption of the male gaze: that women are not aroused by looking at men. You’ll find this idea parroted by lots of people — including lots of women! — who will say things like, “Well, of course there are more female nudes: the female body is simply more beautiful than the male body, which is weird and strange.” The notion is self-perpetuating, because as long as art (in all its many incarnations, from fine art to videogames) fails to look at men as beautiful and worth looking at, viewers will not learn how to appreciate men as beautiful and worth looking at…

Now, caveats: The male gaze is not necessarily lascivious (though sometimes it is) — women’s bodies are beautiful. And critiquing the male gaze is not to say that there’s anything wrong with straight men finding women beautiful. The problem with the male gaze — and the desperate need for a more prominent female gaze — is its dominance, not just visually but as the provider of the perspective. Because most filmmakers and TV creators are still straight men, we are still bombarded with stories that, even when they are ostensibly about women are still really about women seen from a male perspective…