I hate when people throw around The male gaze without actually reading what it means
Like, So many both critisisms on this sub and in wider critique just complain about media terms and use them as buzzwords without having any damn idea what they mean. like that one about the male gaze from yesterday (I think) IF YOU'RE GOING TO USE A SPECIFIC MEDIA TERM, LEARN WHAT IT MEANS, this is not entirely a criticism of just that post but also many other things at once. as somebody who spent the last 5 years of my life studying this shit, the minimum I want is for people to look at the definition for five minutes.
Male Gaze:
let me give a definition of what it is. it is (definition from the Pearson National Btec revision guide) "audiences, whether they are male or female, have to view women from the vantage point of a heterosexual man" it is not people being attractive, and it is not some vague criticism of media. It is a documented problem that stems from the male dominant career of writing and institutional sexism. there is no such thing as the female gaze, because it requires the idea that media suddenly becomes a female dominated industry which is absolutely not the case.
in the male gaze women are depicted as: Passive, the object of the gaze, in need of protection, sexually submissive, supporting men and dependent. these are treated to make them the focus of sexual fantasies. (for a reference on this and how it becomes so standard, think of the "get the girl" plotlines in many films, they show affection as earned by being strong or doing something great, completely removing the woman's own attraction and stating that you can just win love)
men are depicted as active, the one looking at the girls, who offer protection, are sexually dominant (just as a quick aside, I don't mean in the middle of sex, I mean as a whole they are shown as the one in charge of getting the relationship) who take the lead and act independently.
now rather than me flicking through my old textbooks I'll go straight to the actual essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey (recommend checking it out, although it was written 50 years ago it's still massively applicable.)
basically the thing that annoys me is that it's just used so often without having the foggiest fuck what it means.
no it is not the idea men can't be attracted to things, no it is not people thirsting over a well written character for having large thighs. It is the institutional portrayal of women as sexual objects.