Core Post 2 Presley Wilson

In Miriam Hansen’s article, Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship, she premises that “women might be more likely to indulge- without immediately repressing-in a sensuality of vision (scopophilia)”. While not immediately contradicting Laura Mulvey’s theories, most distinctly laid out in Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, this assertion does seem contrary to what we normally learn in terms of the male gaze and the patriarchal system from which films arise. However, when you think about it in terms of the star system, it seems almost blatant, if not obvious. What I mean by this is that multiple male stars are sexualized to an amazing degree, whereas female stars (while maybe more covertly sexualized) usually don’t carry that ‘”unrestrained scopic drive” in the same way. A woman’s reaction to a beautiful male star may be more 'manic' and 'obsessive' than a man’s reaction to a beautiful female star. This doesn’t seem to fit with the fact that woman are the more subjugated and repressed gender, who don’t maintain as many freedoms as their male counterparts and must hold themselves to a more reserved standard, yet it’s very true if we look at reality (in another post I could've discussed how this repression is exactly the reason for the phenomenon). It’s simply more accepted for young, girl fans to stalk, obsess, absolutely-loose-their-minds over their favorite male star (think of the Justin Bieber merchandise market and the thousands of crying girls at his every move). If young, male fans did this over a female star, it would be a little odd, or, frankly, the world may assume he was gay... (This phenomenon may hark back to historic views of woman hysteria but we won't get into that.) While male stars are more overtly sexualized, female stars are more covertly sexualized. For example, the amount of female stars who are sexualized and the normalization of their sexualization is greater. These patterns of overt vs covert appreciation are present in other aspects of the male-female ‘dichotomy’, if you will. For example, in language. Males are more likely to use covert forms of prestige in language while females are more likely to use overt forms of prestige. This means that, women overtly use language to gain prestige and present themselves as higher status. For many decades, it was assumed that only females did this, until a female linguist uncovered the multiple ways males use language to gain prestige as well, just in a more covert way.

Presley Wilson