It's when boys like boys. Male gays

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.

The male gaze is supernatural adding a woman every episode that exists purely to look hot but has no real characterisation other than being a motivation for the main characters and audience. Basically passive, objectified purely for male viewers to ogle at.

The female gaze is hot werewolf skyrim mod

The male gays are two men exchanging pgp keys for encrypted communications

The female gays are women from the island of lesbos. Not to be confused with sparkling roommates if theyre manufactured anywhere else.

Hope this clears things up

what if it was the gale maize and it was a sports team from oklahoma that uses both tornadoes and corn in their imagery

It is not exclusive to film/criticism. It is applied to real life and film/art criticism is part of real life, as are art and film. It includes the phenomenon you describe as worrying about what people think of you and the phenomenon of worrying about how you are being perceived.

Let's start with an assumption that everything you are experiencing is at least mediated or instantiated through your nervous system. The experience of worrying about what people think of you is therefore something that is happening in your nervous system. The idea that it's "normal", as you say, is the idea that it is an experience that is shared by many people but without any of those people coordinating with each other. That indicates that there is some common cause for the neurological phenomenon that is shared among many people.

What is that common cause? It could be said that it is fundamentally an aspect encoded in all of our genetics to have this experiential phenomenon of worrying about what other people think of us. But that would imply that the experiences would be either predominantly similar, predominantly divergent along heritable lineages, or predominantly random.

We don't find any of that to be true. The worry about what other people think of us shows clear social differences. Women worry about different things than men do, children worry about different things adults do, women children and men children different from each other and from their adult analogs, non-gender-conforming or gender-queer folk experience different worries than gender-conforming or non-queer folk. Furrher, we see the things that people worried about 600 years ago have differences from things people today worry about. We even see those worries change within 20 years, let alone 600, and we see differences based on culture and we see that, when transplanting people from one culture to another, the worries maintain their content within the person, though prolong immersion in another society can produce changes.

What are we to make of all this? Well, we come to the conclusion that this ways in which we worry about what others think about us are in fact under active, dynamic, continuous social construction. They are processes we can examine and analyze. And what we find is that our worries don't only come from our interactions with other people, they come from our interactions with artifacts that other people created despite never coming into contact with the creator. Advertising, moves, art, novels, myths, songs... All of these things contribute to what people worry about when they worry about what other people think of them. And we find that these artifacts are created in this way sometimes because people are worried what others will think of them, but more often because people hold a worldview that assumes these ways of producing and representing are "the way we do these things".

And thus, we arrive at the male gaze. It is a term we use to describe the internal representation of the policing behavior of men in a society, such that people act as though they are actively being directed or judged by men who are physically present and motivated to control the behavior of others for the benefit of themselves as men.

The term comes from the concept of the Panopticon, wherein prisoners are all able to be watched by guards at all times, but are themselves unable to see the guards. Under these conditions, the prisoners act however they want and get actively punished for going against the wishes of the guards, so long as their behavior is observed by those guards. By staffing the prison watch heavily in the beginning, you set the preconditions for people to police themselves, meaning they will choose to behave despite not knowing if they are being watched because their nervous system is trained to incorporate the wishes of the guards, arrived at not explicitly but implicitly by the interpretation of the rewards, punishments, and negligence of the guards to their behavior.

The gaze essentially refers to the process that is instantiated in the nervous systems of all the humans that are part of that particular gaze process and the information embedded in the artifacts produced by these humans. We can imagine seeing the evidence for the gaze in long-dead civilization by looking at their artifacts. And we can imagine the process of that gaze being stopped by an extinction event but started up again by discoverers of the artifacts of the civilization as they bring the information of those artifacts into their own social construction process of the gazes within their society.

The thing that made this mostly clear to me was a story about drug addicts.

Someone who was studying state violence decided to research communities of drug addicts. In this one community of heroin addicts, there was clearly structural violence: beatings and killing by cops, arrest, imprisonment, negligence and abandonment, restriction of rights, low access to food and other life necessities, ambient social rejection, etc. But there was also intimate violence: a drug addict in the community commiting acts of violence agaist another drug addict in the same community.

The researcher interviewed and studied these communities and learned something interesting. The perpetrators of intimate intra-community violence often rationalized that violence by saying "that guy was a drug addict, he deserved it".

And the framing the researched provided was that the members of the community replicated the structural violence of their society within themselves and their own community against people who otherwise would have been their allies and highest esteemed peers.

That is the gaze. The replication of the desires, values, beliefs, and actions of others through the self as the self makes choices (both cognitive/internal and expressive/external), regardless of whether those choices are commensurate with the needs of the self.

I wanna throw my hat into it.

It’s an idea or explanation of media (not exclusively, but showcases it best) demonstrating the values and perspectives of men in an audience over women, alongside racial and sexual minorities. It characterizes the “straight while male” as default in the assumptions of the work.

Observations made through media have the unfortunate tendency to be adopted as default observations when there exists or assumed not to any depictions to disprove it. Common examples are depictions of racism and sexism you see in media, which reinforces itself as the assumed default by others.

Real heads around here know i once tried to use the trope of “anime titties” as “ideas reinforced by media being reinforced by media” which i’ve since dropped for the 4 stages of the simulacra.

So you can sort of see that there is connection to how things are perceived IRL. Media is powerful because for many, it’s the only exposure a person may have to something i.e. anime titties. If not addressed or corrected, this leads to a feedback loop where bad observations inform new bad observations. Eventually we’ve unmoored ourselves from reality completely where there may never be a chance to correct these mistakes again. Of course for this to be really bad you’ll have to have a powerfully harmful incubation space for bad ideas to fester and build on top of one another so much that not even sunlight can kill it. Thankfully no such spaces like that exist offline or on. Now if you’ll excuse me I am getting a phone call from the rhetorical hotline, but let me take a BIIIG sip of coffee first…

I actually covered Male Gaze and Video Games in a podcast episode https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/23-the-male-gaze-and-video-games/id1551478278?i=1000530607780

Big grain of salt: it was several years ago, and I have no idea if my egg had cracked at this point.

But the long and short of it is that it's normally something for media specifically. Media is normally given to the person who is partaking in the media through a lens of the creator(s). The way the creator views the world will drastically affect how the media comes across. (This is where Hegemony comes in) The male gaze specifically tends to be how women are viewed through a specific lens of hegemony, aka the patriarchy.

If I remember, there are three things to consider. The male gaze of the character, the camera, and then the audience itself. Each one has their own element that they contribute.

I would recommend starting with the original theory piece by Laura Mulvey https://dn710700.ca.archive.org/0/items/mulvey-visualpleasure/mulvey-visualpleasure_text.pdf

Of course it has been expanded upon, but it's a good place to start. There are a lot of good pieces that go into this in depth. (also take a shot every time someone brings that clip from Transformers cause it's a classic and used as an example all the time for good reason)

as i understand it, it's when (usually visual but idk) media treats women as, fundamentally, objects for men to lust over, instead of as people with agency and motivations of their own

there's a lot of shit downstream that i'm not well versed in but i think that's the core of it. i don't see why it couldn't be used as a framework to criticize real life stuff

A lot of media is created by cishet men, and a lot of cishet men live under patriarchy that encourages.... Well let's just say objectifying behavior.

The virgin suicides is a great example.

This video, despite the inflammatory title. Has a good breakdown at the beginning of what the male gaze is.

https://youtu.be/pZcg4QtHvc0?