Blog Task 7 - Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze Theory

In a world where men and women are represented differently in media texts, pleasure from a  media media text comes from active male audiences and passive female audiences. The men see what they want and the women see what they want to be.

In most music videos, women are dressed in little clothing, appealing to heterosexual men and homosexual women. What makes straight women a passive audience is their aspiration to be like the women they see, as the women they see get a lot of attention for the way they look ect. Unless the video is made by a woman, women are mostly supporting characters in a music video, eg a sexy woman or a mother. A lot of the time, women are shown, but not their whole bodies. By this I mean camera shots of a woman's body part (eg. butt or boobs), but not the rest of them. This is called dismemberment as is very common in not only music videos, but media in general.

An example of this theory is Dizzee Rascal, Holiday.

The video includes main characters, four men, and supporting actors, dancing women in swimming costumes. While some might argue that the women are dressed in swimming costumes because they're at a pool party, theres no explaining why the men in the video are all fully dressed, accessories and all. The women in the video are shown doing few things, taking photos, playing in the water, or dancing for the men. In this particular video, women are purely there to look at, and it shows many examples of dismemberment.

In conclusion, i feel that Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory is still relevant to today's society as females are relentlessly shown as a Mother, or a sexual object, two roles that satisfy mens needs.