Laura Mulvey's View Of The Male Gaze

For a while people have criticized the MPAA’s decisions as subjective, and sexist. It’s common that a film with vulgar sexual language or even rape can get an R rating on their film, whereas any content of woman having sexual pleasure or the showing of any natural “lady parts” instantly gets smacked down with a NC-17 rating because it’s deemed offensive. Laura Mulvey created a perfect term for describing the MPAA’s phallocentric methods. It’s referred to as the “Male Gaze” meaning the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man, where female characters are sexualized, which is common in the rating system. It is also common that sex is rated stricter than violence is. R rated movies contain more violence, sexual violence, and

Film remains a male-dominated industry, and most major film studios are headed by men. Women are chosen/allowed to direct only 5 – 7 % of major Hollywood films, and rarely are nominated for or win major awards for directing. When a female directs a movie and puts emotions into it, directs how the feel a movie should be portrayed, when they submit their movies, they tend to be smacked down with NC17’s (such as Boys Don’t Cry). When male directors film a movie with a bunch of sex and violence it’s always directed towards the male’s point of view, and how they’d like to see scenes. By these double standards we are taking away the liberty of girls by curtailing them. Outdated mindset that prevents women from being treated as equals to their male counterparts, which is the main culprit behind crimes being committed against women in our country. The male gaze puts emphasis on the idea of scopophilia, which is deriving pleasure from looking. The look of the camera is supposed to be neutral, but since most films are written and directed by males, the camera usually views the narrative through a male perspective. The gaze of men in the narrative views the women in the narrative as objects that embody “to-be-looked-at-ness” (aka nude or almost nude).

Film industries and media portray woman as sex objects, not as human beings. Not only is this wrong, but the MPAA encourages these types of films by the way they choose to rate and the feedback they tend to give. Woman generally aren’t looked at as respectable people in a film; they’re merely just there to please the eyes of men. The logic of rating films is clearly backwards, if a rape scene can get an R rating easily, why can’t a sex scene between two people who