The scene is infamous. Megan Fox opens the hood of a car. She is tanned, toned, wearing a cropped shirt, her hair is flowing over her shoulders. The camera lingers on her figure. The film is Transformers, the year is 2007, and the director, Michael Bay, shows Fox through the perspective of the man who ogles over her.
This type of viewpoint is one that we are well acquainted with. So much so, perhaps, that we struggle to see, or fail to interrogate, the dynamics that are at play in much of the media that we consume. In 1973, a film theorist called Laura Mulvey wrote an essay in which she coined the term ‘male gaze’, and suggested that the patriarchy has informed the way we produce visual culture. Consider countless scenes from James Bond films, or Disney princesses whose ‘happily ever after’ seems reliant on both unattainable beauty standards and their relationship to a man. In other words, women in the media are framed through the eyes of heterosexual males, though it is often hard to notice this bias.
But the male gaze applies not only to men, and therein lies the rub. The gaze manifests as, predictably, how men look at women, but also how women look at both themselves and other women too. They have been conditioned to see themselves through the eyes of a man, facilitating their status as the object to be looked at rather than the subject doing the looking. The male gaze is like a devil-on-the-shoulder of subconscious self-objectification.
‘They believe they are giving the public what they want, when that isn’t necessarily true. They are giving audiences what a proportion of males want, and what the rest of society has been brainwashed to accept.’ – Laura Mulvey
The male gaze, then, has far reaching consequences. The term may have emerged from the seemingly superficial treatment of female characters in cinema, and yet it means so much more than this. If Mulvey’s argument stands, then women have been conditioned to present themselves according to a desire for male approval – whether they are aware of it or not. As art critic and novelist John Berger puts it: ‘A woman must continually watch herself … she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually’. It feels quite insidious.
A place where this ‘gaze’ most obviously manifests is, as expected, through clothing choices. The fashion industry is still, even today, heavily steeped in the conditions of the patriarchy: of the top 50 fashion houses in the world, only 14% of them are run by female executives. Often, dressing for the male gaze involves formfitting clothes, short skirts, or dresses, but at what point can women differentiate between clothes they actually want to wear and clothes they have been conditioned to want to wear?
Cue the ‘female gaze’. The term emerged as a response to Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’, and is drifting its way into the vernacular. The concept, however, is not new – women have always been active gazers. The phrase is used today to articulate a historical absence in forms of art, fashion, and culture that subverts that ubiquitous male perspective, but critically, it is not antithetical to the male gaze. It does not objectify men, rather it is about representing women as subjects having agency.
The female gaze may best be described as women looking back at the world, that is looking at them. It has prompted female-centred narratives in cinema and TV, from the live-action version of The Little Mermaid to Barbie, where the doll is reimagined by a diverse cast including Kate McKinnon, Hari Nef and Sharon Rooney. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag breaks the fourth wall, offering a direct conduit into the perspective of the protagonist’s three-dimensional and imperfect character. The appeal of these women is complex, compelling, and far from the passive or superficial depiction that Mulvey railed against.
I recently saw a TikTok where a girl shared her outfit, captioning her video: ‘My favourite thing about this outfit is that men will hate it’. In essence, she had chosen styles and garments that she thought women in general would consider stylish, even avant-garde or eccentric, but would leave men scratching their heads. Can we consider this dressing for the female gaze?
It was the, now oft controversial, writer, Leandra Medine Cohen, who started a fashion blog turned lifestyle website called ‘Man Repeller’. It was a satirical label for fashion – and those who chose to wear it – that defied traditional male understandings of female style. The lifeblood of Medine’s playful yet sardonic ethos was that if a man didn’t like her outfit, she was doing something right.
In the past few years, there has been a surge in hyper-feminine aesthetics, movements that defy patriarchal norms and reclaim ‘girly’ traits. TikTok has been flooded with influencers going for runs with bows in their hair, wearing colourful scrunchies, and embracing pastel and lace. Unlike the ‘power-dressing’ optics that urged women to visually toughen up, these aesthetics feel much more fun. It’s a softer, yet powerful, form of femininity that women once felt compelled to suppress.
And yet, where is the line between an aesthetic and a political act? To put it bluntly, will wearing dresses with pockets reshape the centuries of sociocultural conditioning that has taught women to run checks past male standards for validation of their looks. Margaret Atwood tells us, ‘Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a fantasy … You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.’
The more serious undertones of purposefully not dressing for the male gaze are complex and multifaceted. It has less to do with individual male opinion, but rather a macro-level cultural rejection of female objectification and a confidence in not being found stereotypically attractive. The question remains whether this will ever indent the widespread and acutely felt force of the male gaze. For now, it’s a sartorial mark in the sand.
Featured image: Manish Rai Jain
