Male gaze is the act of males viewing females as an object or representing females as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer in the media, suggested by Laura Mulvey, the British feminist film theorist in the feminist theory.
In the poster of the famous movie of the James Bond franchise in 1981, For your eyes only, we can see there is a female standing in front of James Bond, and the poster only shows her lower body part. The female in the poster is portrayed as a “sexy” image, she is wearing a high hip one piece or under, which makes the shape of her legs and hip show. And the movie was about how the male spy, James Bond, did his mission to save the world, displaying how male is “strong” and “clever”, so they use the image of the female to compare with the male to make a great image of the male. Also, the poster presented how the male viewed females in the 1980s.
Not only viewing the female as a sexual object is a male gaze but also the way portrays the female as a weak icon. In the “princess” story we can see how the image of females is described in different times. In the movie The Sleeping Beauty 1959 by Walt Disney, the plot is about Princess Aurora getting cursed by the evil fairy Maleficent, and at the last Prince Philip fights over the evil fairy and wakes Aurora with a kiss. Even the fairies who have magic as Maleficent couldn’t save Aurora, but the prince can save her just with a magical sword. We could see that it is showing how only males could beat the villain and save the female character.
However, in 2014, Disney made a new film with the same story of Sleeping Beauty, called Maleficent. The beginning of the movie is slightly different from the old one, but the ending is different. The original story was about Prince Phillip saving the Kingdom and the princess, in Maleficent, the one who saved the kingdom of the fairy and Aurora was Maleficent, the evil fairy in the original film, and the villain in this movie was the King, the father of Aurora, Stefan. The helper of Maleficent in the film is Aurora, who released the wings of Maleficent to let her save the fairy kingdom. The film demonstrates more on how strong and brave the females are, and how males are useless and greedy, which is the opposite of the stereotype.
By comparing the two films about the story of sleeping beauty, we can see that in the past, the standards of portraying females and males were being different. In the earlier, they would prefer to illustrate males as the strong character, the protagonist, using the “male gaze” in the film. But recently, some more films or media depict females as brave, strong protagonists.
Hi Venus! I loved your comparison of the old and new versions of Sleeping Beauty and how it shows the evolution of gender portrayal in media. Your article sparked my curiosity about the potential impact of these changes on viewers’ opinions and whether they represent a significant shift in the industry or just a superficial one. I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter.
Great blog! I think it was a great article that provided an interesting perspective on this topic and offered some valuable insight into how male gaze can be interpreted in different contexts. It also presented a balanced argument, which made for an engaging read!