the female gaze doesn't exist
Are you still dressing up for the female gaze? You can stop now. It doesn't exist.
If you have been moderately active on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts in the past few months, you must have encountered the “dressing up for male gaze vs. female gaze” trend. If you haven’t, here is the gist.
The “dressing up for the male gaze vs. female gaze” is a Beauty Tok trend where the creators film themselves dressing up or doing their makeup looks in a self-conceived binary notion of voyeurism. First, in ways perceived to be attractive to men (male gaze) — seductive, mysterious, and intimidating. Next, in ways perceived to be attractive to women (female gaze) — fun, outgoing, and friendly.
According to Beauty Tok, the male gaze is what men think women want and the female gaze is what women actually want. While this must seem a harmless trend to the unquestioning eye, it isn’t.
The fact is both these looks cater to the male gaze because the female gaze doesn’t exist. In this essay, I break down what the female gaze theoretically means and why it isn’t what beauty Tok think it is.
The term “male gaze” was coined and popularised by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which explicates mainstream cinema’s objectification of the female body. Mulvey theorises that in Hollywood cinema the camera is the active male voyeur and the female body essayed on screen is the passive recipient of said voyeurism. Thus, the woman on screen becomes an “erotic object of desire” both for the male protagonist and the audience (regardless of their gender).
While the term was coined to explain the heterosexual male lens of Hollywood, it extends to any medium where women are featured — magazines, advertisements, social media, and of course, real life. The male gaze is the cultural extension of patriarchy. Since men control the production and distribution of media, the way the patriarchy views women—something that the collective lens of patriarchy can view, possess, and exploit — is the way that the media portrays women.
In short, the patriarchy through the varied mediums it gatekeeps, controls the narrative around womanhood and the female body. This is what we call “the male gaze.”
Wherever patriarchy exists, the male gaze exists. It isn’t an aesthetic. It is a term that critically explicates the values with which the mainstream media is produced and consumed. In Mulvey’s words, the male gaze is when the “unchallenged, mainstream film code[d] the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.”
It is not just viewing the world as a man, it is looking at women as an object of desire. This male gaze also extends to the lack of nuance in the writing of women characters as they don’t have any other purpose than to be sexualised on-screen or further the narrative of the hero.
The term “female gaze” originated in response to Mulvey’s theory that according to the set conventions of mainstream media, all viewers are made to view the narrative through the eyes of the heterosexual male lead. If all films are made for the audience to identify with the men onscreen, what about the female audience?
In those exact terms, the female gaze is supposed to be media narrated through the eyes of a female protagonist. One popular argument is that a hypothetical movie written, directed, and produced by women would cater to the female gaze. But this logic is flawed.
In her essay, Mulvey argues that the male gaze is inherent to cinema (and for the sake of this article, for all forms of media) because the male gaze is the result of the system that produces cinema. All cinema that comes out of this patriarchal system will unfortunately cater to the male gaze. Even movies that are created by women telling the stories of women are produced within this existing patriarchal system and thus cater to the male gaze.
A few films centring on women’s lives or made by a female crew are insufficient to dismantle the foundation of this system. As long as the patriarchal status quo exists in the mediums through which we consume content, the female gaze will remain an urban legend.
“I don’t think there is such thing as the female gaze. I think there is such thing as the male gaze, as per Laura Mulvey’s theory, and that gaze, if you talk strictly about cinema only, has more than 100 years of monopoly. It colonized the new medium from the start,” in a 2018 interview given to Vulture, celebrated cinematographer Natasha Braier explains. “You could say that it has become the official language of cinema. The female gaze, if there is such, never had the opportunity to truly develop and become something we can analyze.”
An example of a failed attempt to classify a body of work centring the female gaze is the genre of “chick flicks” — films like “Legally Blonde,” “27 Dresses,” and “Mean Girls” which were created for the heterosexual female audience, featuring women-centred stories, romance, and often objectifying the male body. Despite all that, the major drawback of “chick flicks” was that this body of cinema that was supposed to cater to women only catered to a small demographic of women — middle-class, white women.
Although this genre theoretically had all the elements to establish a foundation for the rise of the female gaze in modern cinema, it failed in a key aspect, creating a collective female gaze which is nearly impossible to achieve without a matriarchy carefully shaping it.
Just like the male gaze isn’t the world through a man’s eye, the female gaze isn’t the world through a woman’s eye. The male gaze is the voyeuristic experience of the heterosexual man shaped by the patriarchy and shared by all heterosexual men. A female version of this doesn’t exist because there is no single viewing experience as a woman.
The films created by women narrating the complex stories of being a woman are definitely a start to dismantle the mainstream structures built on the foundation of patriarchy. But at the moment, even those films are not entirely devoid of the male gaze.
Coming back to real life, both the looks that Beauty Tok creators curate, (the one for the “male gaze” and the one for the “female gaze” are in fact for the male gaze because the male gaze is omnipotent. It is impermeable. We live in a patriarchal society. There is no escaping the male gaze.
And the female gaze, at least for now, is hypothetical. It cannot be formed just because individual women are gazing at the world. For the female gaze to exist, a matriarchal society should exist. And shouldn't the focus be anyway on moving away from the heterosexual binaries of gaze and creating compelling narratives that actively centre all kinds of human experience, including POC, Gay, Queer, Sapphic, and transgender narratives?
Loved this! The screenshot you provided as an example has always made me irrationally angry and you so expertly put into words why! These TikTokers may have innocent intentions but girl bffr men will objectify you even when you dress for the girls. The trend also ignores the individual preferences of the imaginary men they’re dressing for. Not every man likes the stereotypically sexy look. Wait as I’m typing this I think you actually already stated that in a more intelligent way but I have the memory of a goldfish lol.
i can't remember where i read it but i remember someone writing that women all have a man inside our head telling us how to behave in order to fit in with societal expectations, and unfortunately this seeps into 'female gaze' content--often subconsciously, but there nonetheless. which, as you explained, renders it just part of the male gaze! great piece, thank you.