In the text written by Laura Mulvey 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), she argues that cinema, and the roles projected on women are the source of womens' oppression (pg15), stating that women are often seen as the 'bearer, not maker, of meaning' (pg15) which suggests women are portrayed as the inferior of men in modern cinema. Similarly, in 'Cultural Theory and Popular Culture', John Storey describes the idea of an audience viewing 'women as sexual objects' (pg18), further enforcing the idea of women's inferred inferiority. This is summed up successfully in Dyer's 'Stars and Audiences', in which he describes that this idea of oppression is targeted at a specific category of people, and that 'the moviegoer is positioned accordingly to the pleasures of male heterosexual desire' (pg188).
The idea that women are 'crucial to the pleasure of the Male gaze' (Storey, p82) is a much discussed topic, with a focussed topic in Mulvey's text being the idea of 'scopophilia'(pg18), defined as '
sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity; voyeurism' (google), as she goes on to describe how female objectification can occur when people see themselves as 'looking in on a private world' (pg17). This is reflected by Storey, who talks about the sole focus of the female body as a 'pure erotic spectacle' (pg83) for a member of the viewing audience.
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