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If you’ve been on TikTok or stan Twitter at all recently, you might’ve come across the term “male gaze” more than once. It’s a phrase that’s gotten attention on and off over the past couple of years — with the search term first trending in January 2021 and peaking in May 2022, before trending again in November 2022 and February 2023.
Now, if you’ve only ever encountered the term on social media, you might be forgiven for thinking it’s just another term for male approval and how women have been trained to work towards it. But it’s a lot more than that.
What Is the Male Gaze?
Despite its recent popularity, “male gaze” is not at all a Gen Z term. It’s been around since 1972, but formally explored in feminist theory a year later by Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist (more on her later).
In general, the male gaze describes the act of depicting women in the visual arts, particularly in film, from the point of view of a heterosexual male — presenting the woman as a sexual object from three points of view:
- the male characters within the film’s story;
- the man behind the camera; and
- the spectator gazing at the film, presumed to be a man.
To better understand this concept, let’s take a quick trip back in time and discuss some of the critical ideas that form the foundation of the male gaze.
Being, Nothingness, and Ways of Seeing
Before there was a male gaze, thinkers — particularly 20th-century French philosophers — first developed the concept of the gaze.
Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist philosopher, first wrote about the concept of le regard, or the gaze, in his 1943 essay Being and Nothingness. He used the term to describe how the act of gazing at another person creates a sort of power difference between the person gazing and the one being gazed at, who is perceived not as a human being, but as an object.
The concept was later applied by British art critic John Berger in his analysis of how women were represented in art and advertising.
In Ways of Seeing, a 1972 BBC film series that was later on compiled into a book, Berger discussed how women were often sexually objectified in paintings — embodying the idea of men as subject and looker, and women as objects to be looked at; men act and women are acted-upon.
Berger used two Renaissance nude paintings by Tintoretto, an Italian artist, to better explain his point. These paintings depicted the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders, where the titular Susanna is falsely accused of adultery by two old men. The elders had caught each other spying on her while she bathed and, knowing that adultery was punishable by death, the two men worked together to blackmail her for sex. She refused.
It’s an icky story all around (don’t worry, it has a happy ending thanks to the prophet Daniel clearing Susanna’s name), but the bathtime voyeurism was a popular scene to paint for artists looking to show off their skills in painting nude women, often for their male patrons.
In these paintings, Susanna’s naked form is watched by the two men, who are stand-ins for both the artist and whoever is looking at the painting. Susanna herself is aware that she is being looked at, but seems almost nonchalant about the whole thing — looking at the viewer directly in the first image, and at herself in the second.
In contrast, the same scene is painted by another great painter, this time a woman by the name of Artemisia Gentileschi.
Here, it’s a completely different story.
Susanna is nowhere near as chill as she is in Tintoretto’s paintings, which, given her situation, is completely understandable. Notice the uncomfortable way she twists her body in distress, and the way Artemisia places the dirty old men above a stone fence meant to keep others away, instead of painting them peering across an open garden the way Tintoretto placed them. They’re also above her, like a malevolent cloud.
Berger’s analysis was the first to use the term “male gaze” to describe the icky way painters have chosen to depict Susanna’s story throughout the 1500s and 1600s. Her story ends with the prophet Daniel investigating the men’s claims of Susanna’s adultery and finding inconsistencies. The men get stoned instead, and Susanna lives to tell her tale.
It’s telling though that nearly all paintings of the story focused on the garden scene, with a naked or nearly naked woman being watched by aroused old men. Not Susanna as she looked up to heaven for help at her trial; not the prophet Daniel — literally the main character of the Book of Daniel — stepping in to save her; not the lying, lecherous men having justice served to them.
Instead, most painters chose to show Susanna’s body, laid out to be seen by her abusers and by extension, the painting’s viewers as well.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
In 1973, Laura Mulvey cemented the term as a feminist concept in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. As with other great academic essays not meant for general audiences, the paper is a little difficult to read, so I’ll do my best to break down the ideas here.
Drawing from psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Mulvey explains that her goal is to show how “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” — in other words, because our world is built for and around men, our movies naturally have the same feature. In a world with such a huge power imbalance between men and women, the cinematic pleasure of looking is split between “the active/male and [the] passive/female.”
We can see this in how it’s still mostly men in the writer’s room and behind the camera, making movies where men speak more often and enjoy much more complex storylines. Women characters are given a limited function — that is, to serve the goals of male protagonists.
Forgive me for skipping the more Freudian aspects of the essay, but the end effect of this is what Mulvey describes as “the determining male gaze,” which projects a fantasy of what a woman is onto female characters on the screen, which are often laid out like Susanna’s body was to be looked at.
The heterosexual male perspective with which movies are made does two things: It objectifies women for the men within the film’s story, while objectifying them for (the presumed male) moviegoers, a group that includes even those of us who are women.
On the big screen, men are doers, the subject at the center of the story, and the ones who look. Women, in contrast, are a spectacle to be looked at, the passive object of the man’s gaze.
In many cases, these are overtly sexual scenes where the audience is literally shown the male protagonist’s perspective, the camera lingering on a woman’s body to excite both the protagonist and the audience. Think Gisele getting a handprint on her bikini in Fast Five, Megan Fox leaning over the hood of a car in Transformers, and just about every single Bond girl in the film franchise. Movies frame a woman’s body in sections to be looked at, rather than a person.
But it’s not always overtly sexual. The male gaze also means that women are not seen as full human beings: They are props in the service of the male narrative, a passive object that incites male protagonists to action.
Let’s go back to the example of Gisele in Fast Five.
We see that she’s scantily clad and so are the rest of the women in the scene. We follow Han’s line of view as Gisele walks away from him, moving in a slow-motion shot that invites the viewer to enjoy her every single move.
At one point, just before she gets the bad guy’s handprint, there’s a shot that literally cuts off her head — as if to say, who needs it? — and we watch, triumphant, as a close-up shot of Gisele’s butt shows us that the mission has been accomplished.
As viewers, we’re made to accept this because the whole thing was Gisele’s idea. Think of the way Tintoretto had Susanna looking directly at the viewer of his painting as the old men in the scene ogled her. Under the male gaze (that is, the paintbrush and direction of men), both women know they are being watched by the other characters in the scene, and are posed in a way that invites the viewer to do the same.
In this setup, Gisele seems empowered — “You don’t send a man to do a woman’s job,” she even says. But in the greater scheme of things, that job is to be an object that pushes the male antagonist to action (touching her butt) to achieve something the male protagonist needs (the bad guy’s handprint).
Here, we see that the male gaze isn’t just the simple oversexualization of women characters. The concept attempts to capture this very limited male point of view: Characters, especially women characters, exist to further his story, support his interests, and help him reach his goal.
Mulvey’s essay on the male gaze was published an entire half-century ago. Though she was criticizing the movies of her time, it’s not hard to see the concept in action in today’s films or even TV shows once you start noticing it.
Are There Other Types of Gazes?
The male gaze uses Freud’s concept of “scopophilia” — literally, a love of looking, or the pleasure of gazing — to discuss how film tradition made women into a spectacle to be viewed and objectified.
In this set-up, one might ask: Can women gaze back? For Mulvey, the answer is no.
Over the years, other scholars have critiqued the concept of the male gaze or used it to discuss other forms of gazes. Some have brought up the possibility of the female gaze, using it to discuss other films and TV shows like The Handmaid’s Tale and Fleabag.
However, the female gaze isn’t just the mirror opposite of the male gaze, explains film theorist E. Ann Kaplan, and this is largely because of the way the world at large is structured around the patriarchy. She wrote, “men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession which is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act upon it.”
Another type of gaze is the Oppositional Gaze, explored by American author bell hooks in her essay, The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.
In it, she argues that the gaze is not just built along the lines of gender, but also of race: hooks explains that the black body is denied, repressed, and interrogated. She rejects Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze because of its “totalizing category [of] Women” — that is, presenting the white woman’s experience as universal among all women — and criticizes how white feminism prevails in feminist film theory.
What TikTok Gets Wrong About the Male Gaze
Now that we’ve gone over the concepts in film theory, it’s much easier to see where TikTok might get the male gaze wrong.
For starters, the male gaze and, by extension, the female gaze serve as a lens for thinking about the media we consume a bit more critically. It does not have anything to do with what you think people of your gender or other genders think is sexy or attractive — which is how countless TikTok videos have framed it. (Here’s a particularly sad one.)
And that brings me to my next point: There is no such thing as “dressing for the male gaze.” On TikTok, there are videos upon videos of girls talking about how they’ve stopped dressing for the male gaze (which, apparently, means form-fitting dresses, skinny jeans, and pretty makeup) and starting to dress for the female gaze (shorter hair and baggy clothes).
The trend is problematic because of three things.
First, it’s giving major “I’m not like other girls” vibes, and that’s definitely not cute nor feminist.
Secondly, it’s just another way to push people to buy more clothes that, to be honest, just adhere to a different kind of beauty standard. Not everyone is going to look good with shorter hair and baggy clothes, and anyway, your feminism shouldn’t have to be all about what you look like and which clothes you wear.
Lastly, and from a conceptual point of view, it just does not make sense.
Here, I’d like to borrow this quote from writer and literary critic Margaret Atwood:
“Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Margaret Atwood
I know. The first time I read that, I had to sit down for a bit.
As a lens for media criticism, the male gaze is a powerful concept not just in thinking about how we are captured on film, by whom, and for what reason. It’s also a good starting point for thinking about how that affects how we think about real life.
After all, movies don’t just reflect creators’ ideas and ways of seeing the world — they also affect how audiences might see the world in relation to what we’re shown on screen, and how we might think of ourselves.
Of course, not everyone has taken a social studies class and learned about Mulvey and the male gaze, and that’s fine. But I do hope we start using these terms with a bit more care, to more critically think about the world around us and how it’s represented, rather than as just another fun trend.
