Key takeaways
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The male gaze is everywhere. In film reviews, in feminist debates, in perfume ads. And in the porn we watch at night, wondering why the woman on screen seems to be there as part of the set. People cite the male gaze a lot, but explain it much less. So here’s how to recognize it on your own, in a movie as well as in a porn video. And how to know that another way of looking exists (spoiler: it’s hot too).
What is the male gaze?
The male gaze, or “masculine gaze”, is a way of staging women as objects of desire rather than as subjects who desire. The camera takes the point of view of a viewer assumed to be a heterosexual man: it lingers on bodies, cuts them up, offers them to be looked at. The woman is looked at. She rarely looks.
It’s a visual grammar, made of framing, shots and storylines we’ve seen so often that they feel neutral. You know that heroine filmed slowly from her ankles up to her mouth while the hero discovers her? That’s it.
The male gaze doesn’t mean “a man’s gaze”
It’s the most common confusion, and it skews the whole debate. The male gaze isn’t the gaze of any particular man: it’s a way of filming, with its own codes. A woman behind the camera can perfectly well reproduce them and film an actress as an object. A man can just as well film differently. The critic and researcher Iris Brey stresses this point in Le Regard féminin. Une révolution à l’écran (Éditions de l’Olivier, 2020): what matters is where you film from, not who holds the camera.
| Key takeaway The male gaze describes a way of filming that turns women into objects to be looked at. It doesn’t depend on the gender of the person behind the camera. |
Where does the male gaze come from? Laura Mulvey, 1975
The concept of the male gaze was formulated by Laura Mulvey, a British filmmaker and film theorist, in the essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, published in 1975 in the journal Screen. In it, she analyzes classic Hollywood cinema through psychoanalysis.
Her idea fits in one image: three gazes that converge. The camera’s. The male character’s, who acts and drives the story forward. And ours, viewers invited to identify with the hero. At the end of these three gazes, a single target: the actress’s body, which interrupts the story long enough to be contemplated.
Fifty years later, the text is debated and criticized. But the term stuck, because it names what many women felt in front of a screen without being able to say it.
Where do we see the male gaze today?
The male gaze shows up wherever bodies are put on display: in film and TV series, in advertising, music videos, video games and on social media. The media change, the grammar stays the same: a female body exposed for a gaze that isn’t hers.
| Where | How to recognize it | Typical example |
|---|---|---|
| Film and TV series | Shots that detail the body, heroines without a real arc | The camera slowly moving up the legs as the heroine enters |
| Advertising | Female body unrelated to the product being sold | A woman in a swimsuit selling tires |
| Music videos | Women as decor, with no voice or role | Dancers filmed in fragments around the artist |
| Video games | Hypersexualized, impractical designs | Armor that leaves the stomach bare |
| Social media | Poses and filters calibrated to be looked at | The arched back “that works” on Instagram |
In film, a small tool helps measure the gap: the Bechdel test, devised by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. A film passes if it has at least two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The bar is low. Many films still fall below it.
The male gaze in porn: what the camera shows, and what it forgets
Mainstream porn is the most direct form of the male gaze: everything is filmed for the arousal of a viewer imagined as male. The framing, the rhythm, the end of the scene, everything follows his pleasure. Yours stays off-screen.
Take the POV shot, for “point of view”. The camera is held by the man, at eye level. You never see his face, only his partner’s body, shot from below. Literally, you’re lent his gaze. Add close-ups centered on penetration, while the clitoris often stays far from the lens.
And then there’s the ending. The American researcher Linda Williams analyzed it as early as 1989 in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (University of California Press): the “money shot”, the ejaculation filmed outside the body, serves as visible proof of male pleasure. The scene ends there. Curtain.
Female pleasure, meanwhile, becomes scarce. In Pornhub’s 50 most-viewed videos, 18.3% of women are shown having an orgasm, compared with 78% of men (Séguin, Rodrigue and Lavigne, Journal of Sex Research, 2018). Four times less. And when female orgasm does appear, it often comes from penetration alone… which doesn’t match what most women experience.
But careful: enjoying a mainstream scene says nothing bad about you. Arousal can’t be ordered around, and it doesn’t commit you to anything. Knowing how an image was built simply lets you choose, and also look for porn platforms designed for women, where the camera looks differently.
| Key takeaway In mainstream porn, the camera takes the man’s gaze (POV shot, framing on penetration, “money shot”). The measured result: in Pornhub’s 50 most-viewed videos, 18.3% of women orgasm on screen, compared with 78% of men. |
How to recognize the male gaze: 5 questions to ask
To spot the male gaze, just ask yourself who is looking, who is being looked at, and who the image is meant to please. These five questions work for a Sunday movie as well as for a porn video.
- Who acts? Who makes the decisions, moves the story or the scene forward?
- Who is looked at? Whose body does the camera linger on, and for how long?
- Whose pleasure is it for? The female character’s, or the viewer imagined behind the screen?
- Is the body cut up? Buttocks, breasts, mouth in close-up, with no face or gaze?
- Does the woman’s desire have a point of view? Do we know what she wants, what she feels, what tips her over the edge?
Three answers leaning the same way? It’s probably the male gaze. No shame in having watched it.
Does the male gaze belong to all men?
No. The male gaze is a way of filming inherited from an industry, not the natural gaze of every man. Many men don’t recognize themselves in it, and some pay a price for it too.
Because this gaze imposes a script on both sides of the screen. On women, the script of being desirable. On men, the script of performing: getting hard on command, lasting, having the “right” body. A role just as narrow, only less visible.
Studies are starting to measure it. Among 195 heterosexual men surveyed by Kuan, Senn and Garcia (SAGE Open, 2022), the bigger the gap between sex seen in porn and sex actually lived, the lower their sexual satisfaction and self-esteem. Another study, by Gewirtz-Meydan, Bőthe and Spivak-Lavi among 726 men (Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2024), links problematic porn use to more body comparison, then to a more negative body image. These are correlations, not proof of cause. But they tell the same story: this model doesn’t necessarily make men happy either.
The American feminist author bell hooks was already writing in 2004, in The Will to Change, that patriarchy harms men too, by cutting them off from their emotions. And some men film differently. The female gaze, Iris Brey reminds us, has no gender.
But careful: recognizing that men suffer from this gaze too doesn’t erase the imbalance. On screen, it’s women’s bodies it cuts up first, and their pleasure it forgets. Both observations hold together.
| Key takeaway The male gaze is a cultural code, not a male trait. It also traps men in a performance script, without erasing the fact that women remain the first to be objectified on screen. |
Why is the male gaze a problem?
The male gaze is a problem because, repeated over and over, it ends up teaching everyone how to look, and how to desire. One image on its own doesn’t do much. Thousands, seen since adolescence, form a script.
For women, this script settles into the most intimate moments: watching yourself from the outside during sex, monitoring your stomach rather than your sensations, faking orgasm because “that’s how it goes”. Not a weakness, not a lack, not an oddity: just something learned. And what’s learned can be unlearned, for example by taking the time to explore your pleasure without performance pressure.
The concept has its limits too, and that’s a good thing. Enjoying being looked at is nothing alienating when you’ve chosen it: feeling desired can be delicious. The question is never the gaze itself. It’s who decides, and for whom.
The female gaze: what does the other way of looking look like?
The female gaze films from a character’s experience rather than from her body. You no longer look at a woman; you feel with her. Her desire has a point of view, her sensations get screen time.
Iris Brey popularized the term in France in 2020. Before her, in 1992, bell hooks described the “oppositional gaze” in Black Looks: Race and Representation: the way Black women viewers, whom cinema didn’t even imagine in the audience, learned to watch while resisting. You don’t have to watch with the eyes you’re lent.
In porn too, the other gaze has its history. In 1984, the American actress and director Candida Royalle founded Femme Productions, to film scenes designed for the pleasure of women and couples. Other women directors followed. Today, ethical porn carries that gesture forward: consent discussed, diverse bodies, female pleasure filmed for real. And faces that truly come.
| Key takeaway The female gaze shows desire from the inside. Theorized in France by Iris Brey (2020), it has also existed in porn since Candida Royalle (1984) and lives on today in ethical porn. |
FAQ
How do you recognize the male gaze?
Look at who acts, who is looked at, and whose pleasure the image is meant for. If the camera lingers on a cut-up female body without us knowing what the woman feels, that’s a strong sign of the male gaze.
Is every male gaze the male gaze?
No. The male gaze refers to a cultural structure of staging, not to an individual man’s gaze. Many men film, look and desire differently.
What’s the difference between the male gaze and objectification?
Objectification means reducing a person to their body or to part of their body. The male gaze is the visual device that produces this objectification on screen, by organizing the image around a male viewer.
Is there porn without the male gaze?
Yes. Feminist and ethical porn film female desire as a point of view rather than as decor. Candida Royalle paved the way in 1984, and many platforms offer it today.
