The Feminine urge to Internalize the Male Gaze, unpacking desirability 🥴 | Khadija Mbowe

• male gaze definition

  • “the male gaze is a term coined by Laura Mulvey a feminist scholar and filmmaker in her 1975 essay visual pleasure and narrative Cinema as explained perfectly and concisely by the conversation adopting the language of psychoanalysis Mulvey argued that traditional Hollywood films respond to a deep-seated drive known as scopophilia the sexual pleasure involved in looking Moby argued that most popular movies are filmed in ways that satisfy masculine scopophilia so this sexual pleasure in looking and this specifically heterosexual masculine pleasure in looking categorizes certain bodies in a certain way and certain bodies are excluded from that as well and we will talk about that in a minute under this masculine heterosexual male gaze there is this flattening of a woman’s image and the particular body that is viewed as the beauty. it’s known as a body in pieces it’s fragments of a woman’s body when you typically think of the male gaze you think of shots of a woman’s leg a woman’s torso a woman’s cleavage her ass in music videos.”

• Jessica Rabbit

• I’ve also seen people on reddit talk about taylor from slomw has a meh face but the “best body” of the group

• The Graduate Leg shot

  • Classic. This was the wallpaper for a while.

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• Lucy lui and her sexy dominatrix scene in charlie’s angel

• Witnessing someone in fragments & basing everything you want to know about them on their body, using these assumption to treat someone as an object

  • dehumanizing

• You’re not interested in me as a person, you just want to know what that ass do

  • view as object first and only

• The gaze is not only external, but it’s internal

  • Taught to fold this gaze into yourself

  • Felt like everything you were doing is to get a husband

  • “Am I too xyz?”

  • Being told to be more ladylike– controlling on behaviors

  • if i act this way, boys will like me

• This environment affects us all

• Effects your mannerism, the way you laugh, the way you speak, the way you dress, the way you behave

• “But will this be unattractive to men?”

• Gaze shifts (beauty standards), & is cultural

• race

  • feeling like the ugliest person in the room or invisible in predominately white spaces because you don’t fit the beauty standard of white/thin

• “I think because I had spent so much of my life having this you’re supposed to desire a romantic heterosexual relationship with a man and because of that if you’re not getting even a bit of Attraction a bit of attention from them at all it means that’s never going to happen for you so even if you have friends cool but that doesn’t matter because you’re going to be alone bitch”

  • you are not even desirable. why are you here?

• You need to be fun! Presentable! Have children!

• “anyways what I’m saying is fuck the patriarchy and these gender binaries and this this cit het hetero patriarchal hegemonic world!”

  • why yes