Mog and Chips

Aside: Sorry guys, didn’t realise I had messages to approve until this morning, so your replies should be there now.

Back to the topic:

Feminist Laura Mulvey describes something in film called “The Gaze” (Which a friend of mine rather amusingly wrote, “The Gays” :P) by which a woman ‘prize’ character is put there to be looked at by the audience, who is assumed to be male. (I’ll state here that I’m sure not all men appreciate “the Gaze” )

So the first natural reaction is to say “Well, there’s women in the audience too, where’s our eye candy?!”

…But when I think about it, in modern film, there is eye candy. Men in six packs getting their shirts off, and think of the fan bases for Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, etc. Troy was a meatfest, and from a personal standpoint rather horrific because before then I didn’t realise that men’s muscle-boobs pecs bounced.

And we’re still clammouring about how skimpy women are plastered all over. Tarzan only has a loincloth and no-ones complaining about him being skimpily dressed and corrupting our young boys into become skinny gorilla men like him.

The problem is that by catering to the “female gaze” it assumes men and women are the same.

Men and women are equal. But they are not the same.

For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, the majority of women (and, of course, some men) just aren’t into “Visual pleasure”. And we haven’t found the female-catering-equivilent to the male “gaze.” yet.

(Excuse the generalisations here: We assume the ‘average’ man, woman here) Cleavage/bum shots work for heterosexual men. Crotch/bum shots work for homosexual men but make women cringe.

Of course, now I’ve got to find a book that describes the differences between men and women, while avoiding Men are from Mars, Women from Venus and its preposterous claim that rejection is worse than forcing yourself to have sex when you don’t want it. Not that rejection isn’t horrible, but there are certain practicalities that you just can’t get around.

(Watch, as I’m flooded by junk because I used the words “pleasure” “cleavage” “heterosexual” “homosexual” “crotch” “sex” and possibly “gorilla” They’ve been caught fairly well so far, like. …The spam. Not the gorillas.)

edit: To illustrate my “Gay Gaze” point, in possibly the most destroying-your-childhood way,

http://davidkawena.deviantart.com/gallery/#Disney-Heroes

(Safe for work, but you’ll get some odd looks :P)

They’re technically well done, and it’s not for an “OMG gay!” rampage, but it is to demonstrate that male eye candy works more towards gay men than straight women.

Edit 2: For anyone not willing to click on that because it reads as if it’s Disney heroes actually doing things, it’s portraits of male Disney heroes posing in their underwear (like for calendar shoots)

…Yes, I cringed too

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