Week 7 Reading: Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'

 For a few year now I have been well aware of Laura Mulvey's theory on the Male Gaze and from this reading I have gained a better understanding of where this idea has developed from. The whole idea of the male gaze is that, 'women are an icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men' within all forms of media. It's the idea within media the 'narrative is driven by the main male figure', but 'women are there to be looked at'. Mulvey argues this stems from the 'sexual imbalance' in that the 'pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female' and that men in this situation are 'the active controllers of the look'. Also when she speaks about the male gaze the idea of the 'phallic lens' comes up, this is the idea that the camera itself has a 'phallic (penis) lens', in other words it looks for the things that will best please the man visually i.e women. 

This is of course somewhat an outdated take, however it still of course holds truth to todays world. There are many forms of media that still adhere to this rule, but you could argue that this ha become more balanced with many scenes being produced for the females visual pleasure. This whole concept is extremely important to look at for our documentary. If we get a pps for our documentary, we must make sure we do not present them in a way that is reductionist to just their looks. This is especially important as we want to make the onlyfans worker be seen as an individual first and an onlyfans worker second. If we present them through the male gaze we wouldn't be staying true to our initial goal as this would mean we are continuing to sexualise them, which isn't our aim.

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