Looking at Women

Key Theorist
 - Laura Mulvey
   - 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975)
   - Discusses the male gaze
   - Female in film is passive, Male is active

Male Gaze
One element of cinema that has risen and identified as a result of theory is the idea of the 'Male Gaze'. The male gaze is the idea that films objectify women for sake of pleasure towards a male dominant audience. Women are depicted as erotic objects for characters within the narrative to view and generally fall within two categories of being either sexually active or powerless. More recently, films have strived to change this outlook with films such as 'Alien' or 'Kill Bill' showing off more dominant and capable heroines who do not fall within the categories. It brings about the idea that there are two types of looking at women in film: voyeuristic, looking without the subject knowing, and fetishistic, applying sexual feelings to anything. The reason it is depicted as a 'male gaze' is because the films position themselves at the spectators being heterosexual and male and fits the hegemonic ideologies in society.

"Men look at women, women watch themselves being look at"
 - John Berger (Ways of Seeing)


“When I talked to audiences about the epidemic of eating disorders, for instance, or about the dangers of silicone breast implants, I was often given a response straight out of Plato’s Symposium, the famous dialogue about eternal and unchanging ideals: something like, “Women have always suffered for beauty.”
 - Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, 1990)


Looking deeper into the idea of watching, there are many sub groups that this can fall under. These include:

Scopophilia 
This is the idea that pleasure is derived from looking at certain objects and is instinctive when people or images are depicted as erotic objects. It can also be considered perverted if it is connected to deviant behaviour such as the aforementioned voyeurism

Narcissim
This is the idea of erotic pleasure being derived from looking at one's own body and, as a result, the media using this as a way of making the audience identify with the image on screen. Specifically for cinema, this is often explained through Jacque Lacan's idea of the 'mirror stage' which emerged as a result of infants gaining awareness of mirrors and their own bodies.

Voyeruism
This is pleasure gained from the subject being watched being unaware of being looked at. An example of this would be 'Peeping Tom' (Michael Powell, 1960) which brings on the idea that, not only is the audience voyeurs, it could be argued that the camera is a voyeur too. One of the finest examples of voyeuristic behaviour in film is Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window' as the protagonist can only spend his time watching the neighbourhood from his window as a result of being confined to a wheelchair. 


Fetishism
For the last one, and most relevant to use of women, this is the idea of an object becoming a fetish as a result of being focused on as sexual desire. The audience can idealise an object when presented in front of them in a sexualised way to displace any sexual anxiety to the extent that even shoes or hair can take on sexual connotations depending on the specific spectator. The audience may also be aware of excessive objectification of the human body, more commonly female, with numerous shots of legs and breasts being focused on. A strong focus on parts of the female body is a fine example of fetishism being used in cinema.