'Male Gaze' Laura Mulvey

In her essay entitled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Laura Mulvey put forward the concept of 'Male Gaze' to illustrate how the way Hollywood films were made oppressed women and thus promoted patriarchy. She argued that the way Hollywood films were made meant the audience identified with the male protagonist, with the female character simply there to be looked at, and the camera angles and viewpoint of the male characters perpetuated this. Mulvey identified three "looks" in film which serve to sexually objectify women;

• The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character.
• The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. 
• The third is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This allows the male audience to view the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.

I think Mulvey's 'Male gaze' concept is evident in the Hollywood films of the 50's, 60's and 70's but has perhaps lessened as the Feminist movement has moved on. However I do think it's still relevant to film as protagonists are still mostly male and all big Hollywood films have beautiful women in them and the camera does tend to do a cheeky head to foot shot of them. Therefore the sexual objectification of women is still apparent in many films, but I think in a different way to the 'Golden Age' Hollywood movies with Marilyn Monroe etc. For example, the beautiful women in Hollywood movies these days tend not to be passive and to have an important role as well as "to be looked at".