CONSTRUCTION: LAURA MULVEY - VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

For looking into further research of how the sociopath displays his women and what he makes them do, to further my knowledge of the objectification of women in film, I read an article by Daniel Chandler, where he discusses about Laura Mulvey's theory 'The Male Gaze' which derives from her article titled Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In the article she declares that 'Men look and Women are looked at', which refrence that women are seen as objects for male pleasure and attention. She further states how ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’.

In the article, she mainly argues about how in various feature films, women are posed sexually and made to act provocatively. For example, in films like Die Another Day and Bad Teacher, both Halle Berry and Cameron Diaz are shown wearing revealing clothing that portrays women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience. This example can be related to a quote by Schroeder, where he says that 'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view'

However, in recent years both Steve Neale and Richard Dyer have argued this point and said that there has been a growing display of male bodies in mainstream film, which could be considered as being sexually objectified, such as going shirtless. For example, the film Magic Mike depicts the life of a male stripper.

In the past 5 years, both male and female bodies are usually objectified is some ways on either film or television. Nowadays, films which depict male bodies in a sexual way are considered fine by mainstream media. This isn't the same case, when it comes to women, since if women are depicted in sexual ways, there is usually a controversey on how the women are perceived in a revealing way.

For example, films like Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL, depict men in a sexual way by them stripping down and posing for women, which makes the male body seem quite like an object for the women's fantasy. In 2011, the NBC network was under criticism for their new show, The Playboy Club, which revolves around the lives of Playboy bunnies in the 1960s, which can easily be mirrored to the Magic Mike franchise on how both of the forms of media are about a group of a gender strips in sexually ways for the other. However, The Playboy Club was a subject of vast controversy and feminists such as Gloria Steinem boycotted the show saying that it "normalized the concepts of male dominance and prostitution", which clearly wasn't the case for Magic Mike. This shows how nowadays there's a hypocrisy when it comes to the sexual depiction of gender.