A bit thought about Female - Male Gaze
Saturday, 19 April 2025 05:18![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
michifuguA bit of thinking on my issue with people who have the "male gaze is bad, female gaze is good" stance: These are the same types who will roast and mock women’s trashy romance/BDSM erotica. It’s like they only care about the "female gaze" if it caters to their comfortability. If you think the female gaze is good, do you also apply that to a lot of female-aimed literature that features rape, paraphilia, and taboo romance fetishes? Most people who claim to support the female gaze only do so because the female character designs aren’t sexualized—which is valid, but at the same time, they’ll attack a lot of female-aimed media with transgressive or taboo elements. The female gaze is more than just whether a female character is sexualized or not, and I wish people understood that.
Like, No, I think people need to realize that reducing the "female gaze" to just "the female characters aren’t sexualized" is shallow and reductive. This is why you’ll see people calling certain gacha franchises "female gaze" just because the female characters have modest, elegant designs—even when the writing is blatant waifu-pandering. Nobody talks about how female-gaze media has a different philosophy in characterization and storytelling compared to male-gaze media.
I’m also not a fan of the idea that if a female character isn’t sexualized, it automatically means it’s female gaze. Plenty of male-gazed or male-targeted media feature women in modest clothing. One of the biggest male-targeted franchises has many female characters who aren’t sexualized at all.
Anyway, the female and male gaze shouldn’t be a strict dichotomy of "good" and "bad." I hate how it’s turned into bio-essentialist nonsense. Especially in recent years, with so much media pandering to everyone/omnipandering, the lines have blurred. It’s a useful term for discussing which audience a work appeals to—not some moral binary where "This Gaze is Ontologically Evil and panders to evil audiences, while the other one is Ontologically Good."
Like, No, I think people need to realize that reducing the "female gaze" to just "the female characters aren’t sexualized" is shallow and reductive. This is why you’ll see people calling certain gacha franchises "female gaze" just because the female characters have modest, elegant designs—even when the writing is blatant waifu-pandering. Nobody talks about how female-gaze media has a different philosophy in characterization and storytelling compared to male-gaze media.
I’m also not a fan of the idea that if a female character isn’t sexualized, it automatically means it’s female gaze. Plenty of male-gazed or male-targeted media feature women in modest clothing. One of the biggest male-targeted franchises has many female characters who aren’t sexualized at all.
Anyway, the female and male gaze shouldn’t be a strict dichotomy of "good" and "bad." I hate how it’s turned into bio-essentialist nonsense. Especially in recent years, with so much media pandering to everyone/omnipandering, the lines have blurred. It’s a useful term for discussing which audience a work appeals to—not some moral binary where "This Gaze is Ontologically Evil and panders to evil audiences, while the other one is Ontologically Good."
