'The Male Gaze'

The male gaze is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure. The phrase male gaze was coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975.

Laura Mulvey developed the 'male gaze' theory in her 1975 essay 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema'. The 'Gaze' was an already established concept however Mulvey coined the term 'male gaze' to further examine the gaze in media texts and contexts.  

In order to deliver the male perspective to the audience camera angles, camera movement, cut aways and slow motion are used to make the audience feel as though they are looking at the characters from a heterosexual male view. 

To achieve that, the camera tends to linger on the curves of the female body and/or the reaction of the male within that shot. This places the female as an object for the audience to view.  

The presence of the female in some music videos can solely be for the purpose of display rather than a narrative or active function. 

Mulvey argued that women are given two character types in film:

- Sexually active and promiscuous  

-Powerless and innocent female that is often the spectators watching the video.

During the research into 'Male gaze' in the media form of music videos I have found that the theory is most dominant in pop and hip hop genre videos where there is a strong link between what the artist is presenting in terms of the lyrics and what is shown on screen. I found that in most music videos in this genre, they often have male artist presented as powerful and surrounded with lots of women. On the other hand, the female artists are in tight, revealing clothing and their movement is often seductive. This perhaps represents societies ideology on male and female roles and positions today.