The Male Gaze
The Male Gaze is a theory created by the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975, a term coined by her in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". It is said to be the way visual arts depict the world and women from a masculine point of view and presents women as objects of male pleasure instead of as impactful on the story itself.
According to Mulvey's theory, there are three perspectives:
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the perspective of the cameraman
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the perspective of the characters within the film
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the perspective of the spectator
The theory suggests that the male gaze denies women a human identity, choosing rather to objectify them instead. The theory also suggests that women can more often than not only watch a film from a secondary perspective and only view themselves from a male perspective instead of a female perspective.
In terms of music videos, women are often presented as sex-crazed (nymphomaniacs) who desire a sexual release from men all the time, and music videos will often play to the fantasies of heterosexual males by using costumes like nurses and air stewardesses, or by using sexual fantasies like joining the mile high club. The camera will often linger on the curves of the female body, sexualising them heavily and objectifying them in the process.
A fairly modern example of this idea can be found in the music video for Britney Spears' "Toxic" (2003), as shown below:
No more than 14 seconds into the music video, Miss Spears is portrayed as an airline stewardess in a revealing outfit designed to appeal to the heterosexual male audience. The sultry look she gives the camera plays to the idea that women are desiring sex all the time and appears to be an attempt to seduce the viewer, cementing her role in the music video itself. Later on in the music video, Miss Spears pushes a seemingly unnattractive male into a small aeroplane toilet, but soon removes what seems to be a rubber mask from him, revealing a more attractive male underneath. This scene plays to the male fantasy of joining the mile high club, as mentioned before, which involves the undertaking of sexual intercourse in an airborne aircraft.
Another common theme in music videos is the idea of sexuality and voyeurism, with bisexual or homosexual relationships being portrayed often in music videos. These are often shown with scantily-dressed women in areas like bathtubs, swimming pools or strip clubs. An example of this is the more recent music video for "Ghost" by Halsey (2015). In this music video, one of the first images we are introduced to when the music actually begins is two females in short wigs, gazing into each other's eyes and being incredibly close to each other's face:
The shot then fades to an image of one of the women caressing the other's arm: both are shown to be in nothing more than lingerie, as they roll around on a bed, seemingly engaging in acts of a sexual nature. However, this particular music video also seems to subvert the typical sexualised nature of a homosexual relationship between women, as later in the music video the two women are seen to be pulling faces in front of a fish tank and laughing on the same bed as before:
This subverts what the male heterosexual audience would normally be expecting in terms of a homosexual/bisexual pairing, and normalises their relationship to an image that has become more present in today's society as a result of the landmark votes and campaigns for marriage equality in the LGBT+ community in recent years. This is also significant because of the artist herself: Halsey (real name Ashley Frangipane) identifies as bisexual, and the fact that this music video both conforms to and subverts the male gaze theory shows how far artists and music videos have come.