Ok, so with the release of the Barbie movie, I have been reading from women how the movie speaks to them. One of the terms that has come up is the ‘male gaze’. It’s a term I’ve heard before but never really thought about, and it’s easy to assume what it means. But being enmeshed these days in a project that is time-consuming, but brainless, I decided to listen to some youtube videos and see if I could get a better handle on the term. 

So I would have assumed, male gaze was referring to men looking at women in a sexualized way. And it is, but the discussion around it was interesting. 

The term was coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and the basic premise is that in arts, women are depicted in a way that focuses on their looks. Essentially the view expressed is the way men see women: as sexual objects meant for the pleasure of men. This, Mulvey says, strips women of agency and reduces them to mere objects.  

There is another perspective, the female gaze, which isn’t to just turn the tables and depict men in an objectified way, but is meant to show a scene the way a woman might see things. 

The articulation was that “women don’t want to take ownership of masculine things above men. They don’t want to become men. They want to challenge the norm and change the way we see what is masculine and what is feminine so that we can be more productive and equal”.  

I can appreciate that women don’t want to become men. And in fact, some of the things I hear about in the movies that I don’t care to see, are depictions of women in what are men’s roles. But the discussion spoke of that too as men writing women into these roles in a misguided attempt to make things more equal. This doesn’t in fact really depict women in the way they would want to be depicted, which the women say, is still not allowing them to tell their own stories. Again, that resonates to a degree and I can see the point: these attempts miss the mark and end up with an inauthentic rendering, which is probably what turns me off from wanting to watch the efforts. 

Another articulation I heard was that “men’s perspectives objectify women, while women’s perspective personifies men”.  

This, I have to admit, is probably generally true as well. Men do tend to focus on the physical beauty and this will result in sexualized depictions of women- objectification. 

Women have a different focus, and will tend to emphasize aspects of character, which will build the characters, both male and female, and personify them.  

This seems to me like a legitimate construction of the views.  

I know that there are some who have taken the notion of male gaze to extremes, and advocate for women to disavow all attempts at beauty in an effort to throw off the oppressive chains of the patriarchy, blah, blah, blah. But wanting to be attractive to the opposite sex is perfectly natural, so I don’t think that attempts to make oneself attractive are what is really being addressed when trying to bring attention to the male gaze.  

But I do get the complaint of women in this issue, and the desire of women to be seen as more than just eye candy.  

That doesn’t mean I want to sit through the Barbie movie. It’s one thing to watch a movie written through the female gaze because it’s going to build characters more effectively. However I have no interest to sit through a giant complaint against the patriarchy. I’ll leave that to the ladies; enjoy your night out.