askchapo

Male gaze is specifically a film term. It can be applied to other visual media, but does not work very well if you want to refer to the more general irl objectification of women under patriarchy, as it hinges on artistic techniques like framing and perspective. People will use it for "men hornyly looking at women" regardless, but that's because they have a very superficial and incomplete grasp of what the term actually means.

Male gaze is not the camera being horny in general. It is especially not conventionally attractive women showing up on screen in a sexualized way. Male gaze is specifically the placement of one or several female bodies as a voyeuristic object for the camera as a stand-in for both the male observer and the audience. It will usually not map one on one with a male protagonist's perspective, but take a more disembodied position that allows it do elevate the voyeurism by toe-to-head scanning shots, panning around the body, extreme closeups or other acts of hyperstylizing the body as a fetishized object. Note that i keep saying female bodies instead of women on purpose because it is important for the male gaze that women, as in, actual people with internality and autonomous thought processes that may even have agency in the story, are at best secondary to this concept. What defines the male gaze is that it reinforces how men are supposed to look at women and that women exist for our body being looked at, both of which reinforce patriarchal gender relations.

If you want a good explanation of the concept that actually presents the lesbian gaze as a counterpoint, i recommend this video essay - film is best discussed in a format where you can actually look at film as an example: https://youtu.be/3LcV2HmZUfY

I should mention as a side note that the theory of the male gaze during second wave feminism was originally rooted in Freudian psychology and as such is full of implicitly transphobic, debunked garbage concepts like "castration anxiety" and ridiculously bio-essentialist notions (like imagining women to not have penises by default). As always, it actually works better when you simply discard the Freudian stuff as the inane ramblings of a misogynist cocaine addict who spent every single minute of his life being extremely neurotic and repressed about sex.