One of Laura Mulvey's many theories was The Male Gaze theory. This concept refers to the way that visual arts are structured around the male viewing audience. It is described to depict the world and women from a masculine point of view pin terms of mens attitudes. The concept was developed from her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". The woman is usually shown on two different levels: as an erotic objects for both the characters in the film and for the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power and the woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of "patriarchal" order within film.
The male gaze consists of three sections:
The Spectators Gaze
The male audience are looking at the female characters onscreen.
The Diegetic Gaze
The male characters onscreen are looking at the female characters within the film itself.
The Pro-Filmic Gaze
The filmmakers frame the female characters in a particular way through the camera.
Laura Mulvey argues that the only real power a female character can posses is her sexuality which she uses to manipulate or mislead the male. This re-enforces the idea that female characters are simply a problem for the male to overcome. Mulvey states that the females power can be dealt with in two ways:
- Investigation and punishment- This causes the male to 'gaze' harder to figure out the female.
- Fetishisation- The obsessive focus on the female form.
The Bechdel test is a study that asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who have names, talk to each other about something other than a man.
It is estimated that only half of all films meet this requirement, according to user-edited databases and media industry press. The test is used to indicate for the active presence of women in films and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction due to sexism.
The rules for the Bechdel test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip 'Dykes To Watch Out For'. In a strip titled 'The Rule', two women discuss seeing a film and the black woman explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies these requirements:
- The movie has to have at least two women in it,
- Who talk to each other,
- About something besides a man.
Originally meant as a "little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper", according to Bechdel, the test moved into mainstream criticism in 2010 and has been described as "the standard by which a feminist critics judge television, movies, books and other media". The failure of major Hollywood productions such as Pacific Rim (2013) to pass the test was addressed in the media. The television series Sex and the City highlights its own failure to pass the test by having one of the four female main characters ask: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It's like seventh grade with bank accounts!".
Explanations have been offered as to why many films fail the Bechdel test include the lack of gender diversity among scriptwriters and film professionals. In 2012, only one in six of the directors, writers and producers behind the 100 most commercially successful films in the USA were women.
