The Male Gaze: Three's Company

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. The concept was first introduced by art historian John Berger, in his work Ways of Seeing (1972), which highlighted how traditional Western art positioned women as objects of male viewers' gazes, reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative. It was further articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey's theory draws on historical precedents, such as the depiction of women in European oil paintings from the Renaissance period. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations, and that of the spectator gazing at the image. Concerning the psychologic applications and functions of the gaze, the male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze.