The Male Gaze

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Society arranges a set of standards through the media to communicate with people on how they should live their lives. This can go as far as telling a man or woman how to dress, what to eat, where to work and so on. The theory of the gaze is a concept to analyze visual culture and deals with how an audience views the people presented. The gaze we see most in today’s society is the male gaze. The term, coined by Laura Mulvey, is seen in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” written in 1975 which derived from women in film being mere objects of gaze to heterosexual men to which they are the main audience. Decades later, the male gaze is still seen, as Hollywood protagonists are predominantly heterosexual males. Women are subjected …show more content…

More and more women were getting cosmetic surgery to adjust their looks to ones set onto them by the male gaze. This is an example of why cosmetics play a huge role in society; they symbolize femininity, which is the goal for most women because they believe they need to look feminine in order to attract a possible marriage partner or be taken seriously in other non-romantic settings. Even gyms and supplement companies have felt a positive effect in the area of business because women have anxieties about weight bestowed on them through the male gaze. Thus, most women believe that they should be thin and tall, diet pills and programs can supposedly promise them the possibility of looking like these ideologies men depict onto …show more content…

Advertisements cause a mythical atmosphere that states to the observer that no one is ever ugly, overweight, poor or unkempt. They are not reflective of social reality thus creating a cultural fear to be a part of the mythical world in which everyone is perfect. This is again because of the gaze; there is an advertisement in which a young couple is having sexual intercourse and the woman’s face is replaced with a picture of a BMW. This is placing the image of sex and the female body as something of an object just as a car is. This demeaning advertisement tells us that we are objects of sexual gratification due to the male gaze, thus concluding that woman are constantly judged on our attractiveness above every other

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