Does the Female Gaze Exist?
The Male Gaze is a well-established phenomenon in film, advertising, and other media. In short, the concept of the Male Gaze refers to the tendency of media to view its subjects through the eyes of heterosexual men, even in media that is aimed primarily at a female audience, such as cosmetics ads. In film, this is often explicit – the camera may literally take on the POV of a male character and show the female characters through his eyes – but it occurs even when the camera is a stand-in for a female character, or a fly on the wall. An example is the long slow pan up bare legs and bikini clad bodies found in pretty much every movie pool scene ever filmed. In advertising, the Male Gaze is used to encourage men to want a girl (and by extension, the product she is selling) and women to want to be her, in order to attract the same Gaze. The concept of the Male Gaze suggests that women can be made to view the world – and themselves – through the eyes of men, and that women raised within thi
