Representation of Men in Sex and the City:The Movie

The guy from next door! Is the female gaze applied here.Yes of course it is! The neighbour is always shown to be naked having showers on his balcony whilst miranda sits there fantasizing about what sexual activities she could be doing with him.He is very muscular and always has a new women at his house, although it seems he is there for female audiences to look at, his power is reinforced as he is unfaithful as he has a new women,he has no repect for women.

Representation of Men in Sex and the City:The Movie

Mr BIG - The name of this male character instantly suggest that men have authority, there are only two male protagonists in the film compared to the fivee female protagonists and the male has ironically been given a name like"MR BIG"

Mr BIG is represented as a wealthy man, there are many elements of the new man in him as he is always smartly dressed in a suit and tie, and he is quite a charmer when it comes to his girlfriend Carrie Bradshaw, he wants to buy a house with his girlfriend which shows he can sentimental and emotional and in the house he makes a huge cupboard for clothes for his girl,again this shows many aspects of the new man.

Mr BIGs power is shown as powerful when he leaves his girlfriend standing at the alter,he had the power to break carries heart, here he is shown as heartless and selfish as he only thought about himself.

Lauraaaa Mulveyyyy Maleee Gazzee

Whilst these notes are concerned more generally with ‘the gaze’ in the mass media, the term originates in film theory and a brief discussion of its use in film theory is appropriate here.

As Jonathan Schroeder notes, 'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder 1998, 208). The concept derives from a seminal article called ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and anthologized (though certainly not one of the most accessible) articles in the whole of contemporary film theory.

Laura Mulvey did not undertake empirical studies of actual filmgoers, but declared her intention to make ‘political use’ of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan) in a study of cinematic spectatorship. Such psychoanalytically-inspired studies of 'spectatorship' focus on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts rather than investigating the viewing practices of individuals in specific social contexts. Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’ (ibid., 28). Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’ (ibid., 33), presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’ (ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.

Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents in Freudian terms as responses to male ‘castration anxiety’. Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has has associations with sadism: ‘pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness’ (Mulvey 1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves ‘the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’. Fetishistic looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the cult of the female movie star. Mulvey argues that the film spectator oscillates between these two forms of looking (ibid.; see also Neale 1992, 283ff; Ellis 1982, 45ff; Macdonald 1995, 26ff; Lapsley & Westlake 1988, 77-9).

This article generated considerable controversy amongst film theorists. Many objected to the fixity of the alignment of passivity with femininity and activity with masculinity and to a failure to account for the female spectator. A key objection underlying many critical responses has been that Mulvey's argument in this paper was (or seemed to be) essentialist: that is, it tended to treat both spectatorship and maleness as homogeneous essences - as if there were only one kind of spectator (male) and one kind of masculinity (heterosexual). E Ann Kaplan (1983) asked ‘Is the gaze male?’. Both Kaplan and Kaja Silverman (1980) argued that the gaze could be adopted by both male and female subjects: the male is not always the controlling subject nor is the female always the passive object. We can ‘read against the grain’. Teresa de Lauretis (1984) argued that the female spectator does not simply adopt a masculine reading position but is always involved in a ‘double-identification’ with both the passive and active subject positions. Jackie Stacey asks: ‘Do women necessarily take up a feminine and men a masculine spectator position?’ (Stacey 1992, 245). Indeed, are there only unitary ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ reading positions? What of gay spectators? Steve Neale (1983) identifies the gaze of mainstream cinema in the Hollywood tradition as not only male but also heterosexual. He observes a voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze directed by some male characters at other male characters within the text (Stacey notes the erotic exchange of looks between women within certain texts). A useful account of 'queer viewing' is given by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman (1995). Neale argues that ‘in a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explictly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated, its erotic component repressed’ (Neale 1992, 281). Both Neale and Richard Dyer (1982) also challenged the idea that the male is never sexually objectified in mainstream cinema and argued that the male is not always the looker in control of the gaze. It is widely noted that since the 1980s there has been an increasing display and sexualisation of the male body in mainstream cinema and television and in advertising (Moore 1987, Evans & Gamman 1995, Mort 1996, Edwards 1997).

Bibliography Task

http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2008/06/sex-and-city-movie.html

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/04/17/satc/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_girl

http://www.feministing.com/archives/004026.html

http://community.feministing.com/2008/08/my_problem_with_sex_and_the_ci.html

http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2002/04/the_spice_girls

Delicious tags

http://www.gc-fattyz-gc.blogspot.com/

This independent study is about the representation of women in bad girls, there is a lot of information about different feminist theories such as thorham 1991 etc so I could use this for my study as it is also about the representation of females.


http://www.ienadua.blogspot.com/

This is a blog from a girl that did her independent study on the sex and the city series, she talks about the representation of women compared to past representation, this would definitely be useful for my study although mine is focused on the movie rather than the series.

http://cbjuicyfruity.blogspot.com/

This is about the representation of women in Kill Bill which is one of the texts I will compare sex and the city to, I will discuss how very differently women have been portrayed in the both.

http://mediamj.blogspot.com/

Again this is another blog that has an independent study on the representation of women in sex and the city which is directly linked to my study



http://bananaboijohn.blogspot.com/

this is about the representation of women in stepford wives and how representations of women have changed over time, the stepford wives is not a txt I am comparing it to however this delicious tag is still useful as it discusses the change of roles of women over time which is something I will be including.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html

One of the main theories I am focusing on is laura mulveys theory of the male gaze and this is a very useful site about her theory which has a lot information on it.

http://sexinthecity06.blogspot.com/

Another independent study directly related to representation of women in sex and the city.

KeY WoRdS

Feminism -
Political movement to advance the status of women by challenging values, social constructions and socioeconomic practices which disadvantage women and favour men.

This is a word that will definitely be used in my study as my study is all about the representation of women in sex and the city and I will be looking at many feminist reviews of the film and look at how the representation of women in all films have changed since feminism occurred.

Laura Mulvey –

Feminist academic and media and film critic ,responsible for developing theories of the male gaze in her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’

I’ll be including laura mulvey in my study as I will need to discuss her theory on the male gaze and also discuss whether or not there is such thing as a female gaze in sex and the city.

Representation –

The process whereby the media construct versions of people, places, and events in images, words or sound for transmission through media texts to an audience.

Representation is obviously a very key word for my study as my study is all about the way in which women have been represented in sex and the city

Gender –

Physiological and cultural aspects of behaviour associated with masculinity or femininity, acquired through socialisation, n accordance with the expectations of a particular society.

Aswell as discussing the representation of women in my film I will also be discussing the representation of men, so I will basically be discussing representation of gender roles etc.

Radical Feminism –

a feminist perspective that sees men as the enemy who have used patriarchy and the traditional family structure to suppress all women, regardless of class culture of ethnicity.

I will try and use this in my study and will think about whether this has any connection with the narrative of the film and whether or not radical feminists would agree with the representation of the women in sex and the city.

New Ladism –

Term applied to the male backlash against feminism and girl power, as exemplified by the values represented in magazines such as loaded,FHM and maxim.

I will have a look at whether there actually a new ladism approach in sex and the city, ill analyse whether the value of feminism and girl power are being fought against.

New Man –

A term used to describe a new type of masculinity identified and developed by advertising media in the 1980’s in line with lifestyle marketing strategies. The new man is seen to be more caring, happy and emotional.

I’ll discuss whether not the men in sex and the city are represented as the new man or the traditional man.

Institution – The organisation responsible for the production,marketing,distribution or regulation of media texts.

Knowing the institution that produced and distributed my film is very important as I will then be able to link that to the economical factor of the wider context.