Male Gaze Theory
The male gaze theory was first developed by Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", published in 1975. Like Christian Metz's works, the essay was influenced by ideas from Freud and Lacan and it was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, in addition to works by other film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz. However, it was Mulvey's work that inaugurated the intersection of psychoanalysis, film theory and feminism.
One key concept covered in Mulvey's essay is the idea of the male gaze. Essentially, because film-watching is scopophilic in nature, the viewer is taking an active role in enjoying it. Hence, the gaze must be masculine since traditionally, males take the active role while females take the passive role. This means that the viewer is always masculine in nature, regardless of their actual gender. This in turn means that gender has to follow certain conventions in order to be pleasurable to the masculine viewer.
The Roles Girls Were Born To Play
According to Freudian psychology, because females lack a penis, their appearance is naturally uncomfortable to the male gaze since it brings to mind castration anxiety. As such, in order to present a female on screen, she must be depowered so she does not possess of the power that is castration.
The Sex Object
Perhaps the most familiar way to depower the female is to fetishize her. By emphasizing the woman as a passive sex object, she is no longer threatening but rather reassuring to look at. One way of doing so is the close-up of sexualized body parts. This fragments her body into things to be looked at, affirming the notion that she is not a whole person who wields castrating power, but rather an object, or rather several objects that are intended for the male gaze's pleasure.
The Victim and Villainess
Another way to remove power from the female is to turn her into a victim or a villainess. When the female is in the postion of the victim, she is rendered powerless by the plot and needs to be rescued by the male hero, thus placing her under his power. As the villainess, the female has power, but she is punished by the male hero because of her power, again shifting the balance of power to the male.
The Heroine
However, it is possible for the female to both wield power and still be pleasurable to the male gaze. This is done by protraying the female as the heroine, who possesses both traits of males and females. This enables the male gaze to identify with the masculine traits displayed (e.g. being brave, physically strong, etc), yet allows the character to retain her femininity (e.g. being compassionate, motherly, etc).
“The male unconscious [avoids castration anxiety] by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the repressed figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey, 1975)
How 90% of 13-year-olds got their first erection; circa 1988
“…pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt, asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (Mulvey, 1975)
The begininng of every lesbian BDSM porno ever (don't ask how I know those exist)
“The hermaphrodite archetype represents a sense of personal completeness that goes ‘beyond duality,’ because he/she is one figure, not a duality but a singularity” (Indick, 2004)
“her lack of a penis, [implies] a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (Mulvey, 1975)