This theory mainly focuses on male gaze within films, but can also be applied to music videos as well. In both cases they are the exact same as most girls tend to “strutt their stuff”, a great example of this is any of Rihanna’s videos. She has been portrayed as a slut for many years now, and this is not by her choice. Her record lable has manufactured her this way to gain a large male audience instead of just a female audience. If Rihanna didn’t pose as a slut in her music videos, the male audience would not watch as it’ll be “too girly” for their manhood. This brings us nicely to the Male Gaze theory which was introduced by Laura Mulvey.
Mulvey stated that “Films fascinates us through images and spectacle” meaning that whatever we are watching, it has been put there for the meer purpose to entertain us. Hollywood/mainstream/narrative cinema have been manipulating our visual pleasure by ‘coding the erotic into language of the dominant patriarchal order’ for decades now.
This also brings us onto ‘Scopophilia’ which means ‘pleasure in looking’, and according to this theory, the most pleasurable looking is looking at the human form and the human face. Bringing this to the male gaze theory, woman are the image that men are the bearers of the look. Throughout many films, women are constantly connoted as ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ meaning that they are only there purely to work against the development of a story-line, and be there for the male to look upon. A good example of a film in this case would be “Transformers”. You never see Megan Fox in the action, always outside of it. She is there just to attract an older male audience to give them something ‘pleasurable’ to look at, as transformers was originally a kiddys programme on day-time TV. This makes women an ‘object of fantasy’ by functioning them as both an erotic object for the characters within the film (Sam from Transformers fantasises about Mikalea) and an erotic object for the male audience whom are consuming the film. Keeping the main example as Transformers, this brings us onto the fact that women can also be seen as a threat if they are given a powerful role. In Transformers 3, you see a scene where Carly leaves Sam. This puts the woman in a more powerful postition as she is leaving the male behind, also making the male look weaker. But to counteract this, the director gives the women a teddy bear, thus making her look less dominant and more girly as teddy bears arn’t a very powerful object, but they are a symbol of love.
This also brings us onto ‘Scopophilia’ which means ‘pleasure in looking’, and according to this theory, the most pleasurable looking is looking at the human form and the human face. Bringing this to the male gaze theory, woman are the image that men are the bearers of the look. Throughout many films, women are constantly connoted as ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ meaning that they are only there purely to work against the development of a story-line, and be there for the male to look upon. A good example of a film in this case would be “Transformers”. You never see Megan Fox in the action, always outside of it. She is there just to attract an older male audience to give them something ‘pleasurable’ to look at, as transformers was originally a kiddys programme on day-time TV. This makes women an ‘object of fantasy’ by functioning them as both an erotic object for the characters within the film (Sam from Transformers fantasises about Mikalea) and an erotic object for the male audience whom are consuming the film. Keeping the main example as Transformers, this brings us onto the fact that women can also be seen as a threat if they are given a powerful role. In Transformers 3, you see a scene where Carly leaves Sam. This puts the woman in a more powerful postition as she is leaving the male behind, also making the male look weaker. But to counteract this, the director gives the women a teddy bear, thus making her look less dominant and more girly as teddy bears arn’t a very powerful object, but they are a symbol of love.
Because a director of a film is stereotypically a male, women are forced to also see other women in a male gaze. But as you rarely see a ‘Female gaze’ men don’t tend to look at men in a female gaze. This brings us to the topic of the female gaze, and is there really one? In my personal opinion there is a huge female gaze out there, but within it are male gazes to keep it manly. If we are still talking about films, the female gaze would also be known as a Romantic film. And since the male gaze theory was founded within films, it would make sense to argue female gaze with films. You rarely ever see a dominant female gaze within a action or a comedy film as these are largely male gaze films, but equally you will rarely find a dominant male gaze in a romantic film as this is largely female gaze films. But still within the romantic film you will see slight hints of a male gaze to make it socially acceptable for a man to walk out of a romantic film with his partner. And, more modernly, you have seen hints of female gaze within an action film when the protagonist has their top off. I believe that this is a start to try and bring in the female gaze, and make it socially acceptable for a male to look through a female gaze, just as it is for a female to look through a male gaze.
Bringing this all back to music videos, it can easily be said that music videos are dominantly male gaze, such as any of Rihanna/Katy Perry/Lady Gaga/Nicki Minaj’s videos where they all strutt their stuff about. But you can say that there are female gaze videos out there, such as Take That’s song “prey” where they just walk about with their tops off, attracting a lot of screamin girls but not attracting many males.
The genre we are looking into doing for our music video is rock, and upon studying this we came across that there isn’t really either a set male or a female gaze. But if you really break into the subcategories they generally have a emo/goth gaze. Take My Chemical Romance, most of their songs sing about death (i.e Welcome to the Black Parade). Emo and Goths are both sterotypically seen as people who welcome death at their doorstep. Then again, if you break down a Greenday music video, you will find that the gaze is set to people who hate politics. So you won’t find a typical male/female gaze within a rock video. We plan to use this within our music video, and relate the gaze with the song lyrics.
By Lewis Finney
By Lewis Finney
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