Male Gaze - Music video example

'I know you want me' is a song by Pitbull with the video being of him and half naked women dancing in seperate clips and then dancing around him. The lyrics 'I know you want me' in itself is a perfect example of Male Gaze being put to work, never mind the video itself. The women all have automatic desire for the man, who is egotistical and doesn't pay hardly any attention to the women. Shots of the women go from full body shots showing their sexualised bodies before going to close up shots of the womens faces who have a desiring look in their eyes. The background throughout the video is white, a colour of innocence and purity that suggests the men watching the video should not feel guilty of how they are looking at the women. The women in the music video are for the 'visual pleasure' of the males watching the video. They are simply 'there to be looked at.' The women are passive objects of desire for the male singer in the video which translates to the people watching the video. The stereotypical male fantasy is created for the men watching the video, as they are intended to imagine themselves in the video. Voyeuristic looking is involved with the white colour in the background of the video, removing guilt. Fetishistic looking is involved when building up the women as beautiful and good looking but also giving the feeling they are passive and up for anything.

Male Gaze

- Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and the sexual fantasy from a male point of view.
- This concept came from the book "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema" by female film theorist Laura Mulvey, published in 1975.
- Laura Mulvey tried to make political use in a study of cinematic spectatorship.
- Mulvey notes that people find pleasure in looking at other people's bodies and can do so in the darkness without being seen looking.
- She declared that 'pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.
- In traditional cinema, 'men do the looking and women are there to be looked at.' Women are controlled by men and are passive objects of desire for the men in these movies.
- The cinematic codes of popular films 'are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic need of the male ego'. Mulvey termed this as 'Male Gaze'
- These movies remove the feeling of guilt in the men using certain techniques. They also represent the figure as reassuring to men rather than dangerous to build up the physical beauty of the object and make it more satisfying in itself.

Representation

-Representation refers to the idea that everything we see or hear in media has been constructed.
-Representations can take many forms eg radio segments, newspaper articles, photos, films.
-Everything in the media is a representation of something.
-Media representations may seem realistic but remember they're just constructions.
-At best, the media can only represent reality.
-We are always seeing someone else's interpretation of reality.
-Representations are created through a process of selection, omission and construction.
-Eg a photo, before it's taken you will:
       1. Select what is in the image.
       2. Make decisions on what to omit.
       3. Construct the representation by making decisions about codes and conventions like camera angle and mise-en-scence.
-Code is a system of signs that create meaning eg traffic lights.
-Denotation of a sign is its literal meaning.
-Connotations are the cultural or individual associations a sign has for the audience.
-Example of a code is colour eg black represents death and depression.
-When thinking about media think about how the media represents ideas, events and people.
-Deconstructing media representations eg films is a great way to understand how the media works.