Laura Mulvey and "the male gaze"

Her ideas on "The Male Gaze" come from the works of Freud and is a key feature of the Feminist Film Theory movement of the mid 1970's.
Mulvey states that in films, in particular those from Hollywood, women are represented to provide visual pleasure to men, and this is due to the fact that the film has been constructed in a way where the audience is predominantly male.

The gaze itself is a theory developed to show the power imbalance between men and women in films, and it analyses the way men see women, the way women see themselves and other women. The theory suggests that viewers are forced to watch the film from the perspective of the heterosexual male protagonist, with films constantly focusing on a woman's figure. Events which happen to these women are also viewed from a male viewpoint.

The theory suggests that women are denied free will  and choice in this respect and degraded to having the status of an object.

This is also true in advertising; people are encouraged to look at women in a way that sexualises the woman's body, despite the fact that their form has little to do with the advertised product. (for instance, the image to the right is advertising the jeans that the man is wearing - it has nothing to do with the woman, and her presence actually detracts from the jeans themselves!)

Mulvey's theory suggest that the audience view the film in two different ways; voyeuristically (as something to be looked at) and fetishistically (seeing woman as a substitute for "the lack," the underlying fear of castration) .As audiences watch films, they become onlookers of the lives of others and hence become voyeurs, watching in on the lives of other people. This can then lead to two further effects; objectificiation and narcissistic identification, since voyeurism turns the represented figure into a fetish, and as such it becomes increasingly beautiful, though more objectified.