The male gaze is often described as a way of looking; but in reality, it is a way of ordering reality. Laura Mulvey famously argued that mainstream media positions men as active subjects and women as passive objects, structuring vision itself around masculine desire. But the gaze is not confined to cinema.
It continues to shape how women’s achievements, labour, and creativity are perceived in everyday life. The unsettling truth is that men do not simply “look” at women differently; they interpret what women do through a hierarchy that predates the individual encounter.
John Berger captures this succinctly: “Men act and women appear.” In this formulation, men are granted agency while women are granted visibility, as though visibility were a substitute for power. What follows is a cultural logic where women’s contributions are not simply undervalued — they are fundamentally misread. A woman may produce work equal or superior to a man’s, but the gaze frames it as derivative, emotional, accidental, or ornamental. Her competence becomes a spectacle, her mastery a surprise.
This perceptual inequality is not a matter of individual prejudice; it is structural. Butler’s theory of gender performativity helps explain why: femininity is culturally coded as affective, embodied, and expressive, while masculinity is coded as rational, authoritative, and intellectually grounded. When a woman excels in fields associated with objectivity or high cultural value, her success is interpreted as an exception rather than an expansion of what gender means. The gaze cannot easily accommodate women who exceed the script it has assigned them.
Mulvey goes further by arguing that the gaze is ultimately a mechanism of control, it stabilises male subjectivity by positioning women as mirrors reflecting back men’s fantasies, anxieties, and desires. When a woman creates work that resists this reflectiveness; when she acts, thinks, critiques, innovates; the gaze experiences it as a disruption. Rather than admit its own limitations, it reframes the woman as limited.
This logic extends beyond individual men to entire media systems. As Scannell and Goffman suggest, communication is a moral, interactive order shaped by unspoken rules. In this order, women’s expressions are often treated as lower stakes: a man’s opinion is a position; a woman’s opinion is a mood. A man’s creative output is genius; a woman’s is a hobby. These distinctions masquerade as neutral judgment, but they reveal the deeper truth: the male gaze devalues women not because women lack value, but because the gaze itself is incapable of recognising value outside its own frame.
The tragedy – and the opportunity – lies here. The gaze is not omniscient. It is simply habitual. Women have always produced knowledge, art, theory, and innovation that exceeds what the gaze is prepared to acknowledge. The fact that men often fail to see this is not evidence of deficiency in women, but in the gaze itself.
To dismantle this hierarchy, we must learn to see differently. The task is not simply to challenge men’s perceptions, but to deconstruct the systems that taught them how to perceive in the first place. Only then can we recognise women’s work not as exceptional, but as essential; not as decoration, but as foundation.
After reading your blog, I gained a clearer understanding that the inequality within the male gaze is not just about different ways of “looking,” but about how reality is interpreted through a framework dominated by men. Women’s effort and achievements are often misread—not because they lack ability, but because the gaze itself cannot recognise their value. When women express independent thought or take initiative, it is frequently labelled as resistance or disobedience, exposing the unequal power structure. Yet in both family and society, women carry roles that are essential and irreplaceable. Their value is not supplementary but foundational. Your article reminds us that to truly challenge this hierarchy, we must first learn how to see differently and question the systems that taught us to see in the first place — so shouldn’t we now start thinking about how to make the public truly see women’s power?