The Female Gaze?

[LucyStone]

So, I've been re-reading my notes from my course, when it struck me how often I commented on the poor portrayal of women in media. I've recently started reading up on the male gaze, which explains a lot of this poor portrayal; the default setting for film and television producers seems to be to meet the male gaze.

Now, the term "male gaze" was coined in 1975, by Laura Mulvey, who argued that films showed typically male protagonists, and assumed a heterosexual, male audience was the default.

36 years on, do you feel that films still conform to the male gaze? Are there any films, or even TV shows, which you feel stray away from the male gaze, assuming an androgynous gaze?

i would say grey's is aimed at women (it was created and is run by a woman as well). both it and the spinoff private practice have run dodgy storylines at times but they do also run some positive woman-focused ones - e.g. a character being supported by her husband when aborting a baby he wanted her to have. i was actually watching it the other night and thought how nice it was to see a show where women aren't all really thin and glamourous but still get to have love lives (thinking particularly of bailey and torres but most of the women are presented in a fairly "ordinary" way).

i think the closer is pretty neutral in terms of its gaze.

'It is some shameful shit when tv from 20 years ago starts to look too groundbreaking for modern audiences huh?'

yyyy, exactly.

I do love Greys a little for having race neutral auditions. So instead of saying "A white/black/asian female" they just specify "female" which is why the show isn't the standard all white cast with one token coloured or asian person.

oh that's really interesting ComradeJing.
Reminds me of how Ripley in Alien was written as a man but then they cast Sigourney Weaver.
In utopia there could be race and gender neutral auditions for all parts where it's not crucial to the plot - can you imagine?

Gaming is very interesting - although I'd say RPG genre is getting better at catering to the female gaze. Bioware are particularly good at being gender, sexuality and racially diverse, imo, although they still manage to fall into the impossible female anatomy and ridiculous costumes trap endemic in gaming.

I think with RPG it depends so much who's playing (obviously I suppose). A lot of gamers are men and sometimes I think (looking at it as an outsider) that they can be incredibly sexist while still assuming they are not being so, simply because there's not that critical mass of women to show them how one-sided their views are.

Sorry I meant the single-player RPG games not MMORPGs which are a whole other kettle of fish, although they too are having far more female players which is influencing the genre. However, I know far too many female players who will hide the gender on multiplayer games to avoid hassle or abuse - there is still a long way to go on that score.

Sorry! I follow you now.

A great example of Bioware's attitude is their response to a rant they received about not catering to the 'straight male gamer': Bioware Defends Sexual Diversity

?The romances in the game are not for ?the straight male gamer.? They?re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO and thus don?t need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant? and that?s ignoring the idea that they don?t have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The ?rights? of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent ?right? to get more options than anyone else.?

Thinking of some shows now that feature strong women and their issues.

How would Buffy fit into this concept. It was quite female dominated what with Buffy, Willow and Dawn (I know but I as quite a fan back in the day).

Cagney and Lacey was interesting too, especially for back in the 80's. Lacey was quite normal looking, not overtly sexual and it focussed often on her family issues and the issue of being a woman in that kind of career with a family. I can't remember anything quite like it, especially for that time.

Tenko was great and again very unusual in being almost totally female show.

I think there's an issue with shows like CSI which sex up just about everything. It sets completely false images for men & women - and def. the women are how men WANT them to look, and the men are how men think women want them to look (does that make sense). It is all just glammed up stereotypes.

Very depressing how popular it is.

Then there's those 'Real Housewives' shows, which are even worse. Because they are about 'real' people, it gives the impression that if we dress like that, and act like that, we, too, could be rich like that. That is so far from the truth.

Even well written shows still are very male-centric, with women often being lesser/stereotyped characters (I'm thinking about Breaking Bad, Dexter, True Blood type).

It just seems to be that Tv companies & Hollywood just can't understand that women are 50% of the population, and therefore 50% of the spending power. Given the stereotype of women spending their dh's hard-earned money, youd think that they would at least attempt to get some of our money, even if they didn't like/respect us.

AnonWas, 45% of self-identified gamers are women, though. Isn't that a surprising statistic? I was really surprised, because it's SO male gaze.

I don't think things have got very far. There are certainly scenes in TV, films, that will make me come over all unnecessary, but they're few and far between, and it's so little catered for that I can't even really define what they are. It's certainly not Romantic Hero Is Romantic, though.

Modern Family?

Yes, it is -very interesting though tortoise. Is that true of both live role play and online games? Sorry, I'm ignorant, seeing this mostly via DH. His local RPG club is and has for years been overwhelmingly male-dominated and they've always said this was the norm, but of course it may be they have a rather skewed perspective!

"According to a survey done in 2004 by the Entertainment Software Association, 25 percent of console players and 39 percent of PC game players are women. Also, 40 percent of online game players are women; however, these numbers also include casual games.

According to another study conducted by the Entertainment Software Association in 2010, 40% of the game playing population is female, and women 18 or older now comprise 33% of all gamers.

Also, the percentage of women now playing online has risen to 42%, up several percent since 2004. The same study shows that 46% of game purchasers are female (Entertainment Software Association).

In recognition of the importance of the issues of women and girls as game developers and players, the International Game Developers Association, an association of companies and individuals in the games industry, has formed a special interest group on Women in Game Development. This is an active field of discussion and a topic in many conferences in the video gaming industry."

It also depends on the genre of the game as well the demographic can differ.

Maybe I've got this wrong a bit! By the "female gaze," are we talking about films presented through the perspective of a female (e.g. Pan's Labyrinth - perspective of the young girl,) films with strong, positive female characters or those where men are depicted in a way that appeals to women in a sort of sexually objectified way?

It may be that I've misunderstood what the "male gaze" means in this context - I'd always thought it was about the last of those 3 in reverse - women depicted in a way that appeals to men in a sexually objectified way (regardless of whether there are strong, positive female leads or if the film is shot from the perspective of a female character.)

Probably just me being confused again! :)

I don't think a male/female gaze exists. What's a female gaze then? Everything pink and ponies everywhere? If it just means that women aren't objectified, there's no reason why a male gaze would do that, and a female gaze wouldn't.

the male gaze is about films (or was, originally) and how pretty much all of them reflect the predominant patriarchal views of society. So even in a movie written by a woman, funded/produced by women, staring women & aimed at women, it can be a reflection of patriarchy, rather than a reflection of how women would choose to present things, if they weren't so brain washed by patriarchal views.

(I am prepared to be corrected on this - I spent about 1 day on this for film studies about 20 years ago)

e.g. Emma Thompson's 'Sense and Sensibility'.

A story which COULD be re-interpreted as the women refusing to marry until men have actually grown up, accepted responsibility, and that they are prepared to enter adult relationships, was actually all about pretty dresses & quoting poetry.

So, a female gaze, would be how women represented things, IF they stood back & thought about stuff.

So, the Diet Coke add of the guy cleaning windows & drinking Diet Coke, is NOT an example of a female gaze.

Considering the vast number of women who cite friendship & laughter as their greatest attraction in a man, then a male hero who bothered to listen to a woman, and was funny as well, would actually be the best hero for a romcom. However, while those attributes have in recent times been accepted into the romcom, good looks and being taller than the woman still seem to be the main point of attraction.

Mulvey herself suggests that utterly radical new ways of film-making would be necessary to circumvent the male gaze, so no, and I agree with Anon, no films/tv programmes are likely to be free from it. Not least because, in terms of the history of culture, it is difficult to construct what the female gaze might be.

Clearly, it is not the female gaze, but in terms of shock value and a paradigm shift effect in making me truly understand how completely embedded the patriarchal/misogynistic male gaze is in film, I have never been more viscerally shocked than when I watched "Lilya-4-ever" and the horrifying rape/prostitution scenes in this film which depicted them as though through her eyes, so you only saw these leering, grunting, disgusting men lunging over the camera, and her legs at the edge of the frame, but you did not see her, her face, her body. At that point I realised fully that every sex or even rape scene I had seen on screen had always been shot from the point of view of male power and the male objectification of women, regardless of the intentions of the filmmaker. I have never been able to watch "Lilya-4-ever" again.

"Lilya-4-ever" is not really the sort of film one would want to watch again for pleasure, of course, so what I meant by my last comment was more that, even recalling those scenes, I am on the verge of tears. I found it truly haunting. I cannot say that about even a film like "Boys don't cry", which, likewise, I could never watch again.

I haven't seen Lilya-4-ever (and don't think I want to tbh) but your post makes me think that film adopts either the male gaze (as standard) or a kind of distancing strategy that exposes the male gaze for what it is (as in the Lilya-4-ever example, or some other films I can think of that 'break the rules'), and yet no film I can think of adopts a female gaze because, as you say Penth, it is difficult to imagine what a female gaze could be, or if a female gaze is even possible at all without inventing a whole new visual language.

I think the movie the Piano had a very non-male gaze. As did Whale Rider. But I don't think that male gaze is an inherently bad thing in a movie, as it ca show us new perspectives as well as confirming stereotypes.

I also thought Babette's fest and Like Water for Chocolate were both female gaze, or at least, neutral. Even though again, they were depicting a male-dominated society.

IT's not that the male gaze is necessarily bad in and of itself, more that it's accepted industry-wide, to be the only one.

New ways to film would be needed - e.g. the height at which a camera is held, so that it's more often level with the woman's height than the man's (or a child's - what about their perspective?)

sound - now, do men really tune out the sound of babies crying in the background? if so, then we need to re-introduce it. Film-makers say that they don't put in natural background sound because in rl we tune it out, but on film it's harder to do that, & it's distracting - but how true is that? Wouldn't we learn to do it? Sound in movies is v unnatural. ('The Office' actually DID include some natural sound, and it can be done)

I'm really interested in different perspectives in narrative, so would love to see a movie that showed the same events from different pov

Christine Edzard's 1988 2 part adaptation of Dickens' Little Dorrit does the 2 perspectives thing. It is a lovely film, this reminds me I should watch it again!