Laura Mulvey

The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men.

From the feminist perspective, this theory can be viewed in three ways: How men look at women, how women look at themselves and finally, how women look at other women. Typical examples of the male gaze include medium close-up shots of women from over a man’s shoulder, shots that pan and fixate on a woman’s body, and scenes that frequently occur which show a man actively observing a passive woman.

The Male Gaze suggests that the female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male. In 1929 Salvador Dali released a film called Un Chein Andalou, which is an abstract short film that portrays a perfect example of this. One scene in the film, a man is found dissecting the iris of a young woman’s eye, which infers this idea of female sight not being central, and that men are not only the audience, but also in control of the action, the camera, the direction, the writing, et cetera, therefore completely running the show, dominating the entirety of the narrative and how it is depicted.

Not only is the Male Gaze theory relevant to cinema, but it also correlates with every-day life. Some theorists have noted that in advertising, objectification and sexualised portrayals of the female body can be found even in situations where sex or representations of sex have nothing to do with the product being advertised.

Although as of recently, movies like Frozen (2013) and Suffragette (2015) do Mulveyjustice in highlighting women’s independence and empowerment, breaking away from the Male Gaze, decades later we still see the same broken record playing, with films like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) revealing women in extremely sexual and somewhat unnecessary manners.

One reason for this is simply that the movie companies producing these films are male-dominated, as cinema is predominantly a male-run industry, and just like when Mulveyoriginally wrote this critical analysis of film, producers are still churning out the same work that has proved to be successful in the past with audiences as they invest to make profit. They believe that they are giving the public what they want, when that isn’t necessarily true. They are giving audiences what a proportion of males want, and what the rest of society has been brainwashed to accept.

However, many people argue against Mulvey's theory of the camera being a heterosexual male. This argument can be made in films such as Magic Mike (2012) which is a film the revolves around male strippers and the pleasures that females again from watching. I wouldn't in this instants see the camera as a heterosexual male as watching male strippers wouldn't bring gratification to a heterosexual male, however, it would to a heterosexual female. 

Sources:
https://www.filminquiry.com/film-theory-basics-laura-mulvey-male-gaze-theory/
http://www.studentnewspaper.org/laura-mulvey-and-the-male-gaze-in-the-21st-century/
http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/visual_pleasure_and_narrative_cinema%28printversion%29.html
http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-the-male-gaze-mean-and-what-about-a-female-gaze-52486