The term female gaze has become increasingly visible across pop-culture and media discourse. Generally, it is understood as a perspective shaped by women—either directed toward the self or toward the world. While the male gaze is classically sexual and objectifying of women, the female gaze is liberating– women taking ownership of their perception (as its colloquially understood). Across film, media, and social media, the female gaze is becoming an increasing popular phenomenon that both invites a larger female audience to claim female presence in viewership counts, and give stage to female artists to depict this gaze.

Importantly, this term circulates with a mostly descriptive neutrality: it names an orientation without yet assigning moral or analytical weight. In popular usage, the female gaze is often associated with alternative modes of looking, dressing, storytelling, and relating, distinct from the traditionally dominant male gaze. However, pockets of the internet pedestalize creators who embody the female gaze as opposed to the male gaze. What follows is an overview of how this concept has entered contemporary culture before examining its deeper implications. I describe the rise and implications of the idea of “female gaze” before overall concluding that that within the constraints of a patriarchal society, the female gaze, simply, cannot exist.

The Rise of the Term “Female Gaze” in Pop Culture

On platforms such as TikTok, creators use the “female gaze” to describe a particular aesthetic: gender-fluid, androgynous, or subtly expressive rather than overtly sexualized. The male gaze is typically invoked to characterize older or more traditional fashion trends that emphasize sexual appeal (take the Kardashian, Fashion Nova craze of the 2010s), while newer stylistic choices (trad wife, Sophia Richie-core) are framed as embodiments of the female gaze. Both male and female creators participate in this categorization, suggesting that the term has come to function as a stylistic shorthand rather than a strictly gendered epistemology.

This compilation encapsulates what the audience views as male vs. female gaze in today’s landscape.
In film culture, the female gaze is used to denote a woman’s perspective behind the camera and within narrative design. This often involves an emphasis on emotional intelligence, relational nuance, and inclusivity—of genders, identities, and casting choices. Films such as Pride and Prejudice or the Twilight series are positioned as examples of “feminine” direction and characterization, partly because they foreground interiority and portray male characters through a lens shaped by feminine desire and affective depth.

Let’s Start with the Male Gaze…

Film theorist Laura Mulvey argues that the unconscious of a patriarchal society shapes filmic structures, granting principle agency to men. Psychoanalysis becomes useful because, as she writes, it renders “the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order,” allowing feminists to approach the roots of their oppression. Freud’s notion of castration anxiety—the fear of losing masculine power—underpins the fetishistic fixation on women’s bodies in film.

This manifests as objectification: women are positioned to be “looked at and displayed,” their appearances “coded for strong visual and erotic impact” that connotes to-be-looked-at-ness. The woman becomes the erotic spectacle; her purpose is visual consumption. John Berger succinctly articulates this dynamic:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.

– John Berger

Cinema extends this relation through literal mechanics—the camera follows the man’s gaze, panning on men’s desires and capturing what they want to possess in sight and materially. Film becomes a vessel for masculine fantasy, even though in ordinary life, femininity may be demeaned or vilified. For male audiences, film offers escape; for female audiences, it offers a mirror in which they see themselves molded for male desire.

The theoretical foundation of the female gaze emerges as a response to Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze. Mulvey’s psychoanalytic analysis of film argues that cinematic form is structured around a masculine unconscious: women become objects of visual pleasure, positioned as passive recipients of a male viewer’s desire. Because the female gaze arises in contradistinction to this framework, it is not an omnipresent or dominant perspective. It operates as a compensatory idea—an attempt to name what sits outside or against the masculine framework. This responsive nature is essential, as it underscores the argument that the female gaze cannot be fully disentangled from the male one.

Universality of the Male Gaze

Examples saturate mainstream cinema: fast-paced action franchises, prestige dramas, comedies, and even workplace shows all rely on visual tropes such as unnecessary nudity, slow pans across female bodies, tight or impractical clothing, and narrative structures where women function only as lovers, sexual objects, or maternal figures. The failure to pass the Bechdel test is not incidental, it reflects a broader diminishment of women’s emotional and intellectual presence. Crucially, the male gaze is not simply how men see the world. It is: how society is presented to us, how women see other women, and how women come to see themselves.

Internalizing the Male Gaze

Berger describes the internal split within women: the surveyor (male) and the surveyed (female). From childhood, women are taught to track their own appearance, evaluating themselves from the vantage point of male approval. This produces a perpetual self-monitoring—walking, weeping, speaking, even existing—under the imagined scrutiny of an internalized watcher.

Mulvey’s conclusions fold into Margaret Atwood’s framing of male fantasy: whether pedestalized or degraded, women remain positioned within narratives authored by masculine desire. Even rejecting or resisting the fantasy becomes another version of it. Women become their own voyeurs.

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

The Era of the Female Gaze

But gone are the days that media and life let men’s pesky gaze rule women’s perception… right? Entering this era of female gaze sits on one paradigm: telling women to dress for men is corrupting and disenfranchising (which I agree with). What it also says is that telling women not to dress for men is good.

In 2024, Julia Fox proclaimed that she is no longer dressing for the male gaze after realizing how internalized her internal voyeur had gotten. New York Fashion writer Leandra Medine pens a new term that would soon symbolize a sub-group of gen-z fashion: man repelling which she describes as

…outfitting oneself in a sartorially offensive mode that may result in repelling members of the opposite sex. Such garments include, but are not limited to, harem pants, boyfriend jeans, overalls, shoulder pads, full length jumpsuits, jewelry that resembles violent weaponry, and clogs

Unlike the male gaze, which was intended for film theory, the female gaze has transcended media spaces and has become a cultural zeitgeist. The female gaze is often defined by negation– what it is not. The female gaze is not attracting men, it is not dressing in the articles of clothing men often describe as desirable. Or perhaps, what would men hate? It provides a mechanism for women to discover personal style beyond wanting to be viewed as an object of attraction.

Reframing the Female Gaze

However, at the centre of the female gaze narrative still lies the very oppressive force that the male gaze imposes: catering to and considering men. It is hardly any more liberating to not dress for men, as it is to dress for them because we are still viewing ourselves thorough the lens of the man.

Not to mention, one of the second order effects of the ‘female gaze’ trend being a virtue signalling amongst women where some women claim to be ‘better feminists’ because they don’t dress for women while assuming others do. This often manifests in vicious, hostile comments, deriding women for their choices under the assumption of their intention to appear attractive to a male audience. In doing so, the liberation that the female gaze had intended to seek gets diluted into a memetic game. Furthermore, the virtue signallers too are viewing themselves and the other women through the male gaze to make this judgement. I believe this is only natural.

Given this pervasive adoption of the male gaze, the concept of a female gaze becomes complicated. If women are their own voyeurs, shaped by the same frameworks that mythologize and objectify them, then the female gaze cannot emerge fully autonomous. Its circulation in trend cycles reveals this: what is now described as female-gaze fashion is largely a resurgence of 90s styles filtered through contemporary values such as sustainability or gender fluidity. The gaze itself is not new– only the language is. The female gaze, as popularly understood, attempts to name a perspective beyond the male gaze. Yet, because it emerges as a response and because the male gaze structures not only film but socialization, embodiment, and desire, the female gaze cannot exist independently. It participates in a cyclical relationship in which its meaning is shaped by the very thing it seeks to counter. The paradox lies here: in trying to articulate an alternative, the female gaze reveals the extent to which the male gaze has already defined the terms.