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| Laura Mulvey |
In the sexualised world we live in today, pleasure has been split into two seperate parts: the male gaze and the passive woman. Women in the media nowadays influence men and their fantases e.g. many young women are shown as sexual objects through music videos which are common in R&B genres.
I believe that Mulvey's theory has been around long before media and technology considering nude women were depicted in paintings. However, women in music videos may not be nude yet the way they dress or act still present them as the passive. This tends to happen because the artist wants to target a male audience. Girl groups/bands have a tendency to go for the sexualised image as they are more about the image than the voice. However, majority of their fans are female e.g. The Saturdays. Within music videos, the camera lingers on the curves of the female body and event which occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. This relegates women to the status of objects. Here is an example of Laura Mulvey's theory in Notorious by The Saturdays:
Despite the points mentioned above, some female artists still axchieve the sexualised female image yet take on the dominant role by being active e.g. Beyoncé. Here is an example contradicting Mulvey's in The Best Thing I Never Had by Beyoncé:
