11: TikTok Asks: Female Gaze VS. Male Gaze | What Even is the Female Gaze?

So is there a female gaze? Yes. But it is not sexy men jumping around, like in Magic Mike, or a closeup of Thor’s badonk. This tends to confuse people. If hypersexualized depictions of female bodies, like up skirts in anime, and mega tight clothing in superhero movies (that shows a surprising amount of booba that is in no way tactical), why is it then, that the “female gaze” isn’t Magic Mike? How are they both the male gaze? Well, despite Magic Mike being about hypersexual and overly sexualized sexy men dancing for women, it still views people not as people, but as bodies, a habit the female gaze argues cinematographers should get out of.
Linguistically, I completely understand how the female gaze sounds like it should be defined as "what women idealize" if the male gaze is of course what men are taught to idealize. But it is however, much more complicated and abstract. The "female gaze" and "male gaze" don't actually gender the abstract ideas they hold, though they are colloquially "gendered" terms. I believe these types of intricate differences between colloquial language & academic language is such a huge barrier to the understanding such abstract ideals, and at the risk of sounding pretentious, this video essay attempts to delve into the Male Gaze VS. Female Gaze debate. 

Conversations about the male gaze and female gaze can easily get really heated and muddled and people can argue about definitions, subjective experience and even biology. And the most complicated part of that conversation would be that nobody’s argument would be incorrect, but all parties must accept there are multiple lenses to the same issue. Without acknowledging both subjective experience and empirical evidence, we will never be able to to enact meaningful change. Having these sorts of conversations are pivotal because figuring out why we think the way we think isn’t as simple as it sounds. To acknowledge that the reason why we find something  or someone attractive has to do with what we’re taught, what is expected, and what is shown to us, and that is terrifying. 

So, if we understand what the male gaze is, and how it hypersexualizes women and has the ability to even degrade men too into being hyper masculine macho people. We then recognize how ridiculous it is to value someone’s attraction based purely on bodily aesthetics, and how much more important it is to value a person's personality and what makes them unique and different. This then goes into a deeper recognition that men and women should both be allowed to wear whatever they want. Like Harry Styles in a beautiful dress or Demi in an awesome pantsuit. They are just clothes after all, personal, how an individual chooses to show

Transcript

INTRO
0:00 Hey Guys! It’s Reese! Welcome to Reese Grey Analyzes, I am so glad you decided to Adventure with me today. On Reese Grey Analyzes we look at creations and experiences in art, media, music, & even videogames to explore exactly WHY we think the way we think, question what we believe, and learn something new. 

So if you look behind me, my cat might be like scattering around... there's like a thunderstorm right now so she's kind of spooked. So hopefully she's all right and I don't want to disturb her too much because she's so adorable and cute in the windowsill over there.

MALE GAZE VS. FEMALE GAZE
0:35 So my last video on how the male gaze impacts men was pretty well received and I'm so glad you guys enjoyed me answering some TiKTok questions and I got a lot of questions about well what about the female gaze on TiKTok as well. So is there a female gaze, yes. But it's not sexy men jumping around like in Magic Mike or a Thor or Captain America close-up of some badonk, we really get a lot of that in Marvel movies don't we? Even of Hawkeye and Spider-Man lots of badonk there. Hypersexualized depictions of female bodies like upskirts in Anime, Mega tight clothing and superhero movies that shows a surprising amount of Booba that is in no way tactical.*Anime Soundbite* "the target is approaching we'll hold her off here" Both of these depictions of bodies; hypersexualized women and hypersexualized men, are examples of the male gaze.

1:34 So the female gaze is not hyper sexual men being sexy, that's still the male gaze. And it is misogyny itself that causes this hyper masculinity. So if Magic Mike was filmed through the male gaze am I saying that Magic Mike was for men? No. Magic Mike was still filmed through the male gaze and it was for women and women enjoyed it too which is okay, but we have to under stand the cultural influences in which men were depicted in such a hypersexualized way. The female gaze is a reactionary concept essentially it works to subvert the normal expectations of what we usually see in cinema to change the way we view attraction and sexuality in general. While the male gaze is observational, how men and women are already seen in the world, and thus in art and Cinema.

2:26 The male gaze objectifies men and women while the female gaze offers agency to everyone involved. We can see objectifying men doesn't solve any problems plus another downside of hypersexualized men via the male gaze is that men are still objectified, and just because you're making things equal in a way, that doesn't make it right. Feminist academics aren't going around like well well well let's make it fair and overly sexualize male bodies and give them no personality and let's make it even by making men feel like they can never be good enough because they their necks will never be as large as Channing Tatums. And then everyone's just sad and doesn't feel like they're enough. Feminism wants to objectify nobody and instead recognize the unique attributes of a person that makes them uniquely them and equalize the playing field.

3:18 So I think this concept tends to confuse people sometimes because it's misleading because you hear "male gaze" and you think that word means through men's eyes and the "female gaze" women's eyes, but it's really not that simple. And it's because of social conditioning that teaches us that bodies are attractive and sexy. The female gaze challenges that by challenging people to look at both men and women as complex people not bodies and it asks Cinema to evoke emotions and feelings focusing on a sensual and intimate interaction and atmosphere even in lighting.

Comparing the male gaze versus a female email gaze we can see that they are not direct equivalents, which makes things kind of difficult. Female gaze is based on sensations of intimacy and attraction. This is not to play into this trope of "men are more Visual and women are more emotional" because that is what the male gaze teaches us. Rather the male gaze sexualizes men and women and the female gaze focuses on the artistic work of making someone seem attractive through means other than their body. Rather than gender or sex it's just valuing everyone's agency so valuing people for who they are and valuing intimacy and sensuality instead of determining your physical attributes are what produces arousal.

4:43 This can be seen in shows like Bridgerton where people's Intimate Relationships, personalities and such are what found people attracted to each other. And did they still find each other's bodies attractive? Of course, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it was an addition to an intimate it bond being formed. The whole point of Bridgerton was to show people wanted to marry for love and exploring what love and intimacy is and how that grows in form and looks like and how it grows and forms and shows differently for different people and how love and intimacy is so complex and personal which is why conversations such as these tend to get so heated because we have to recognize the subjectivity of these types of experiences and we also have to realize the ways in which culture influences the way we feel in the first place.

Intersectionality in Feminism
5:39 Laura mulvey coined the term “male gaze” in her essay “Visual Pleasures of Narrative Cinema”. And people brought up that Laura Mulvey’s male gaze didn’t consider intersectional issues. So intersectionality is when you consider issues that effect different types of people, most notably marginalized people. So, how black women and men are viewed in the male gaze is different than how white women or asian women and men are viewed. And I want to note that critiques of academic work, it doesn’t necessarily mean the research or  theory or work was bad, but everything can be improved on. The point of academia is to challenge eachother and learn new things and prove things through rigorous analysis. Every subset of a different types of peoplecan narrow it down tons and tons and tons the way you experience the world is going to be different based off of who you are how you were raised where you are in the world Etc not only how you are perceived by others but how you perceive yourself. So the female gaze as well is kind of like built on top of this concept of intersectionality, and we can't really have a conversation about the female gaze versus the male gaze without talking about intersectionality.


Asian Men in Pop Culture (EX: Kpop, Filipino & Chinese Men)
7:00 I want to get into how the male gaze is harmful to men, because still it excludes certain groups of men as well, the male characters like Magic Mike fit this status quo of what in Western culture is usually considered appealing in other countries such as East Asia and now more commonly in the U.S with the rise of K-pop and such challenges the traditional Western ideals of what an attractive man is supposed to be.

So the male gaze ends up harming men by objectifying men too, as well as it objectifies women with this hyper masculine standard. For example, in a western male Society, Asian men ,even widely successful K-pop Idols... are sometimes compared to be super feminine and it's so odd how these girls find them attractive. I want to get into some fun facts about the emasculation of Asian men actually. This started years ago since a Asian men started immigrating to the U.S. Fun fact but actually really sad fact I guess, in the 1930s Filipino men immigrated to the United States to work as laborers and in their downtime they would frequent taxi halls where they'd defy the times segregation laws by dancing with white women. In response to the dancing, they were demonized as sexually promiscuous and threatening so white men formed "Filipino hunting parties" that dragged Filipino men out of these dancing halls and beat them up.

8:36 Back when Filipino men started immigrating to the United States, it was part of their culture to where nicer clothes and have a more polite demeanor, they were said to have better hygiene stereo typically. An women, notably white women, found this interesting and attractive. Also 20 years after that, so in 1950 there was an influx of Chinese male immigrants. This created more ethnic enclaves of single Chinese men who were tight-knit in their Community, primarily in West Coast cities such as San Francisco. These all male groups contributed to a public perception that Asian men were sexually deficient, creating a stereotype that Asian men couldn't get women... but you know, language barriers, cultural barriers. But this lended to the perception of the undesirability of Asian men, perpetuating emasculation.

9:28 Not to mention the few times Asian men were portrayed in cinema, they were either the villain or a joke, or extremely exotified. So this didn't help their case either. So conversations about the male gaze and female gaze can easily get really heated and muddled and people can argue about definitions, subjective experience, & biology, but having these sorts of conversations are pivotal because we're trying to figure out why we personally think the way we think and why we find something attractive has a lot to do with what we are taught, and what is expected, and what is shown to us. So if we understand what the male gaze is and how it hypersexualizes women and has this ability to even degrade men with this same objectification into being this hyper masculine Macho muscular person. We recognize how ridiculous it is to value someone's attraction based purely on their body and their Aesthetics and how much more important it is to value a person's personality and what makes them unique and different. Let me know what you guys think of this in the comments since attraction is so subjective. And I'd love to hear how you guys experience it and what you guys think about intimacy, love and attraction and sexuality in the media. What show maybe best represents how you see attraction.

Conclusion: Both Men & Women Shouldn’t Be Expected to Perform Their Gender
10:56 So in just questioning why you think the way you think, and recognizing that there are outside influences to that it's a broader reorganization that men and women should both be allowed to wear whatever they want and express themselves. Like Harry Styles in a beautiful dress, or Demi in an awesome pants suit. They're just clothes and it's personal how an individual chooses to Showcase themselves to the world. Expression should be personal rather than performative for instance a woman dressing girly or sexy just to attract men because that's what we're taught is supposed to be attractive. These biases and these ways that you can act in your everyday life can even be unconscious and this is why we try really really hard to understand the world around us and question what we believe and learn something new. And sometimes doing that can be really scary because questioning that makes you question all of the other prior decisions that you made. And I really hope that this expanded on the prior video and that you guys enjoyed it, it was a lot of fun to make like every other one of my other videos! So I hope that was clear and let me know in the comments if you feel like you disagree or if you feel like I missed something or if you know you have any questions.... and I always love to hear your thoughts. I don't want this to seem as like some kind of lecture where I like talk at you guys and lecture at you guys because of course there are things that I can learn too. So, alrighty guys I know this is kind of a cross between like a mental health Monday like I try to do formatting but like what is formatting?

Come To the Spooky Partython LIVE on TWITCH

Join the Discord or join me on Twitch to watch some gaming live, I'm gonna start doing live commentary too so that'll be a treat! And I'm really excited for it speaking of uh twitch.tv/hewworeese... guys h-e-w-w-o-r-e-e-s-e here it comes.... you know what's coming up.... it's spooky season! My fave. And for that, I'm gonna be doing a spooky subathon on Twitch! We'll be doing Halloween cookie decorating haunted house decorating and I'll be playing Community games like jackbox Fall Guy eyes Mario Kart someone requested spooky Minecraft someone wants me to play Roblox and someone wants me to cosplay as brisket from Guilty Gear.... So this Halloween stream is probably gonna be wild guys. And yes, my mod beyde will be making spooky Jeopardy. And it'll be so spooky cute. So for the whole month of October we'll be dedicating it to Spooky cute games and we can't forget the gummy bear train from Good Old Costco too. So join the Discord, or follow me on Twitch for more information on that I'm HewwoReese on Twitch, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter h-e-w-w-o-r-e-e-s-e So come by I love to chat with you all and of course you can find my links in the description or on reesegrey.com. As always I appreciate you guys and I'm looking forward to so so so so so much this month so that's it for today okay love you bye!