Women everywhere have been talking up the feminist themes of "Magic Mike XXL," discussing how the film handles women’s sexual pleasure in a way that is honest and real. FINALLY.
YouTuber Laci Green is the latest feminist to jump on the chiseled abs bandwagon. In her new MTV Braless video, Green discusses how this movie about male strippers brings out a concept new to Hollywood: the Female Gaze.
Green’s Female Gaze is an offshoot of the Male Gaze theory, which was coined in 1975 by British feminist Laura Mulvey. In her video, Green breaks down the main components of the Male Gaze, explaining the idea that the camera "in films lingers on women and sexualizes them in non-sexual contexts.”
"The Male Gaze is considered dehumanizing,” Green says, "because it treats women as one-dimensional sex objects without any agency or desires of our own.”
Yet the Female Gaze “has different power dynamics than the Male Gaze,” Green argues, since women’s sexuality can seem like a lose-lose a lot of the time. "Our culture places this bizarrely high value on a sexless, virginal woman,” Green says. "Women who are old or overweight are told they’re not sexy and don’t deserve love. Women who are too sexual are ashamed and called sluts and whores."
But in "Magic Mike XXL," “people of all ages and sizes, races and gender expression are free to be sexual on their own terms.” Therein lies the Female Gaze: women in this movie are given power over their sexual desires -- something we rarely, if ever, see on the big screen.
So ladies, run -- don't walk -- to go see "Magic Mike XXL" (and, yes, Channing Tatum’s hot bod).
