Laura Mulvey proposed the theory of 'The Male Gaze', in 1975 which states that in the majority of film texts produced, rather than remaining gender neutral, the camera is male and usually views females in a way which gratifies male audience members with visual pleasure or scopophilia.
The aim of Mulvey's essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, was "to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject.". Through her essay, one of her most prominent findings was that females are forced to identify with the way that males look at females in film and that a film text "codes the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order".
'Woman as image, man as bearer of the look' - the pleasure of looking is split between active/male and passive/female. The visual presence of the woman ' works against the development of storyline' and 'freezes the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation'.
Female viewers are forced to adopt a male point of view as it is the male protagonist that controls the events in the narrative - the audience has to identify with his point of view.
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