session 6: gender and identity

This week's blog task was to look at Laura Mulvey's essay 
Laura Mulvey discusses the topic of the male gaze in her essay, it's about the fact a majority of cinema is seen through heterosexual male eyes and society itself at the time was run through the man's penis more than the brain. The male gaze itself refers to the fact in film whenever a woman would come on screen there would be an emphasis on her body and curves and everything would be set in slow motion so that men could 'appreciate' what they were seeing. Of course this essay was written in an earlier more patriachal society, but in film I would say that this kind of behaviour hasn't changed in the slightest. There was even a recent film that came out on Netflix, it was beyond even the male gaze but one of paedophilic nature. The movie is called Cuties and it is set around a dance group of 12 year old girls and even though the director was a woman for the film, the message it put out was the opposite of what she wanted, in fact it was almost heinous how much they sexualised these young girls. The truth is the male gaze still occurs today in society.