Welcome to the female gaze.
For decades, mainstream film and television have taught us how to look at women, but rarely how to see them. We’ve been told what a heroine should be: beautiful, desirable, and orbiting someone else’s story. But a new generation of filmmakers and creators is changing that, one frame at a time.
To understand the female gaze, we first need to look at what it’s responding to. In the 1970s, British film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to describe the way media presents women through a heterosexual male lens. This perspective objectifies and sexualizes women, casting them as passive figures whose purpose is to be watched. Men are positioned as the active agents of desire and control; women, as objects.
The female gaze flips that script, not just by putting women behind the camera, but by fundamentally shifting how stories are told. It centers women’s subjectivity rather than their surface. It gives us access to their thoughts, emotions, desires, fears, and contradictions.
Importantly, the female gaze isn’t about women stepping into the roles men have traditionally played—it’s about humanizing women onscreen. It invites us to see rather than to consume. When the media relies solely on the male gaze, we lose vast parts of the human experience. Countless aspects of womanhood have gone unexplored, flattened, or erased.
We’ve missed out on emotional nuance. On authentic depictions of pleasure, agency, and interiority. On female characters who exist beyond love interests, muses, and plot devices. On stories that prioritize female friendships, rage, power, vulnerability, joy, and the full spectrum of womanhood beyond a single beauty ideal.
In traditional media, women are often treated like scenery—beautiful but static, meaningful only in how they reflect on a male lead. The female gaze hands them the pen. It lets women narrate their own lives.
So what does the female gaze look like onscreen? It looks like empathy. Like intimacy that isn’t invasive. Like silence that doesn’t need to be filled. It looks like characters who cry, scream, laugh, bleed, and breathe in ways that feel real.
A prime example is Greta Gerwig’s filmography. Her coming-of-age stories are full of awkwardness, ambition, and heart. Her characters can be selfish, uncertain, and messy—just like real people. Through empathetic framing and interior storytelling, the female gaze allows space for contradiction, vulnerability, ownership, and rebirth. It doesn’t fear stillness or subtlety. It invites you to sit with a character, not just watch them.
Television is catching up, too. Series like Fleabag, Sex Education, and Yellowjackets center women who are layered, flawed, and fascinating.
The rise of the female gaze comes during a broader cultural reckoning around power, representation, and authorship. As more women, queer creators, and BIPOC filmmakers step behind the camera, they are reshaping the narrative landscape. This shift isn’t just artistic—it’s political. It challenges long-standing norms around whose stories matter. It reclaims space, redefines beauty and agency, and demands more than tokenism. It demands truth.
Audiences are no longer satisfied with stories that just look good—they want stories that feel real. Stories that resonate and reveal. The female gaze delivers on that.
To look through the female gaze is to enter a world where women are not decoration or distraction, but subjects. It’s not a mirror. It’s a window. And what a view it is.
This isn’t just a trend. It’s a transformation.
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