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- Sexist Cinema; The Female as an Object of Sexual Desire -

"The unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form"

This is how Laura Mulvey begins her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'; a definitive piece in which she examines the 'male gaze', the way in which women are viewed as sexual objects in what she perceived to be a male-orientated cinema.

The 'male gaze' is the terminology used to depict the way in which the camera in films tends to look at the subject from a male perspective, thus objectifying the female form. Mulvey argues that the male gaze dichotomy affects the narrative structure of cinema as men are active protagonists responsible for forwarding the story, whereas women are purely viewed upon in terms of their sexuality and are therefore passive.

It is ever present in cinema that the female form is looked upon as an object of sexual desire. One prime example that springs to mind straight away for me is a scene from Bill Forsyth's 1983 film 'Local Hero'. Jenny Seagrove's character 'Marina' is shown swimming through the water whilst three businessmen stand at the side of the pool watching her. The camera keeps cutting between the three businessmen and their looks of sexual anguish, and 'Marina' in the water; the camera clearly showing the viewpoint of the three businessmen. To further this still, one of the businessmen actually states 'she's got a great pair of lungs on her' a clear objectification of the female form.

Anne Friedberg, much like Mulvey in her approach argues that cinema produces stereotyped representations of women. In her essay A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification', Friedberg states her view that cinematic identification is prefigured by the identification processes we grow up with in our early childhood. Friedberg felt that cinema merely served to reinforce values of male dominance, and the sexual objectification of women. Friedberg's theory has strong Freudian links in her ideas about early childhood experiences affecting our perceptions later on in life and can be seen to draw upon Freudian theory of the phallus as an object of power. Females are objectified in films Friedberg feels as males hold the balance of power in cinema which allows for females to be viewed in terms of sexuality.

The way in which females are presented in films as sexual objects can be seen to be changing with time. Whilst Mulvey speaks of men being dominant in films and progressing narratives through their

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