Laura Mulvey Essay and the Male Gaze

    While writing this post I thought of how complicated and important this topic is and that you need to read a lot in order to write about it. In my opinion, the feminist theory and its focus on the male gaze is not something that you can write for in just a few paragraphs, it needs to be explored, summarized, and explained in a longer post or essay. Because of that I decided that I want to explore this topic more and that I am going to write my Fascination Project essay about the feminist theory and its focus on the male gaze in films by using examples from different old or contemporary films such as Vertigo, Blonde, etc. 

    I have studied about this topic before, but I have never read Laura's Mulvey Essay before. I am glad that I got the opportunity to do that in this class. I found her essay very interesting and informative. I like how she mentioned all of the important facts on the topic and how she focus on the importance of the feminist theory in film and the analysis of the meaning of the male gaze. Not only that I am a woman, and that I can relate with some of the things written there, but also because I am a film lover I can say that almost everything that Laura mentioned is correct and needs attention. 

    I agree that in many films and in the reality woman are portrayed as passive object of desire through a masculine lens. I like the explanation that she gives that the male gaze is not just about how they view women but also how they create the female characters. I also agree with her point that the most popular movies are filmed in a way to satisfy the masculine scopophilia. She also mentions the masculine voyeurism and that it tends to sexualize women for a male viewer, for the male world and the heterosexual perspective. Women are not objects to be looked at and to be used for the pleasure of the male viewer.

    In order to start exploring this topic more and to start thinking of how to do my essay, I found and watched this video on youtube. The video is very informative and it summarizes many of the things mentioned by Laura.