michifugu: Takki in Shinjidai (Uma Musume - Agnes Tachyon)
michifugu ([personal profile] michifugu) wrote2025-04-19 05:18 am

A bit thought about Female - Male Gaze

A 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."
captaincassidy: by @wormcoffin (wormfoil)

[personal profile] captaincassidy 2025-04-20 12:06 am (UTC)(link)
Great post, as usual! Fully agree.
deadfinch: (Default)

[personal profile] deadfinch 2025-04-24 04:32 am (UTC)(link)
agreed! i find the terms to be worse than useless, honestly, and i never use them. i get what they're trying to communicate, but i think there are other ways to express "this thing has fanservice that is broadly appealing to men" and "this thing has fanservice that is broadly appealing to women" without conflating being a man with attraction to women and being a woman with attraction to men and especially without conflating them with factors that i think are mostly orthogonal, like "this thing does/doesn't write its female character misogynistically" or "this thing does/doesn't engage in fanservice that is sexually suggestive in nature"

like obviously there is a lot of history and sociology around the prevalence male-oriented media which assumes attraction to women and includes misogynistically-written, sexually suggestive female characters, and that's a huge issue which warrants criticism! but crystallizing this trend into these two Ontological Categories with no room for nuance just reifies gender essentialism, as you say. (and ignores common areas where the dichotomy immediately breaks down, like Things Which Include Sexually Suggestive Female Characters But Are Not Misogynistic, or Things That Are Ragingly Misogynistic And Also Made To Appeal To Women, which is, like, so many things...)
Edited (typo) 2025-04-24 04:32 (UTC)