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Writer's pictureBasil Faisal Qureshi

Voyeurism: Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze and the Consequential Female Gaze

No matter what dictionary you look at, you get the same definition of the term voyeurism; the act/practice of gaining sexual pleasure from watching others who are either scantily clad, engaged in such activities or appeal to some fantasy of the voyeur.

The idea of voyeurism is frequently evident in the music videos with the idea of 'screens within screens' and the notion of looking. This further emphasizes that we are watching someone for pleasure.


The basic classification of the voyeurism concept, especially in media, comes from the "male gaze" theory of Laura Mulvey.



The Male Gaze concept by scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey was put forward in her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". The male gaze is when the voyeur is supposedly a man and the subject of the voyeurism is a female. This theory argues that music videos objectify women and portray them only for the voyeuristic purposes of the audience. The theory argues that while male characters might be smartly dressed, women will almost always be scantily clad with the camera focusing on their individual body parts, portraying them completely as objects rather than whole human beings.


In reality, this theory is true for several media texts, especially a lot of music videos. keeping true to the theory, many music videos show women as only objects of sexual pleasure for men and they mostly have no other role or significance, completely degrading them to objects and taking away any essence of a human being from them.

There are so many examples of such videos that one cannot even imagine mentioning them and since we have to move onto "Female Gaze" as well, I will only list a few examples.


Maroon 5 - Animals


While I will just attach the remaining examples for you to see yourself and judge the level of voyeurism present, I believe I should at least discuss one video to discuss the practical use of voyeurism.


Animals by Maroon 5 can be considered an extremely lewd and coarse video with explicit references to sexual activity. in the video, Adam Levine plays a butcher and stalks his wife, playing with animal blood and fantasizing about her. It caters to the pleasures of the niche audience that enjoys watching salacious music videos. It gives the audience pleasure of watching something which they shouldn't watch.



PitBull - I know you want me


Miley Cyrus - Wrecking Ball



Having given a few examples which should make it absolutely clear what The Male Gaze is all about, let's move on to the Female Gaze. The female gaze was a response to Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory and argues that not only males, but females take visual pleasure through voyeurism as well and this theory is like a role reversal, with the males becoming the subject, reduced to only sexualized objects, whereas the female becomes the voyeur.

Examples would include


Call Me Maybe -Carly Rae Jepsen


This should give you a fair idea of what voyeurism is and how can we classify a certain media text, especially a music video, to be voyeuristic. Also, now you will probably realize that probably at least half of the music videos you have seen so far are voyeuristic.

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