More into the Male Gaze

    Entry 5: 2/15/22

    So, I said we were making a documentary on the male gaze but.. what even is the male gaze. To start off, this topic is super underground and not talked about enough at all. I did not even know about this until Isa told me about it and sent me a few of videos to watch about it. Honestly, there is not a lot on this, very little people are actively talking about this and I find this extremely alarming especially since the topic is so important!! Let me stop dragging it on and let me explain what the male gaze is.

    The official, very wordy definition is "the perspective of a notionally typical heterosexual man considered as embodied in the audience or intended audience for films and other visual media, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women," but I will break it down so it is easier to comprehend. It is simply a fact that a lot of things we know are male dominated and created by men. To add to this, most of those men are normally heterosexual men. This means that everything created for media, business, etc. is all through a man's lens. This changes a lot since everyone grows up with different ideals, belief, and unconscious prejudices. Naturally, these ideals that they base everything they do on can end up harming or representation a group incorrectly. More specifically, women and how they are represented in the media. But what do I even mean by that? I mean the unconscious decisions to automatically have women wear tight clothing, have the camera angles focus on a women's body, and much more. The male gaze inevitably portrayed women as object or sexualizing them instead of actually showing them as a human being. This portrayal in the end is all for the entertainment and eyes of men. 

    It is a no brain that the way women are portrayed in media causes a huge issue. This representation causes viewers to build their perception of women or even different groups as what they have learned from the media; imposing gender roles and affecting the way society treats them. Not only this, but it creates unrealistic standards. This whole objectification of women makes young girls question themselves in terms of self esteem and who they even are. The male gaze impacts a huge amount of people such as different ethnic groups, religious groups, races, and much more but it would physically be impossible to include them all in our documentary. We would mostly focus on young women and how the male gaze affects them growing up and now. 

    The topic of the male gaze is a lot to unpack. It is extremely upsetting to find out that no matter what you do, as a women myself, I will always be first thought as different from a man and constantly being sexualized. This has already happened a lot but I was never able to pin point how I was feeling. It feels no better to know there is a word to it but its nice to know that it is slowly being more talk about. 

    Here are some of the videos Isa sent to me so I could find out more about the male gaze:

Jill Soloway's Masterclass

Laura Mulvey and the Male Gaze Theory

Portrait of a Lady of Fire

    That is a very short summary of the male gaze. This documentary is going to be a hefty one and I really hope we are not putting too much on our shoulders.