"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature, In popular imagination the term is used in a more general sense to refer to someone who habitually observes others without their knowledge, with no necessary implication of sexual interest.

Feminist Film Thoery: In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking.

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."

Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor.

"In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking.

"Psycho" 1960; One of the most notable horror films, the female victim is indeed, attractive.

This theory is highlighted in film series such as the "James Bond", and "Indiana Jones" series. The extensive list of ""Bond Girls", all attractive and objects of the male characters desire proves many of Mulvey's arguments concerning the perceptions of women in films.

Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women.
1) The perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character.
2) The perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen.
3) The third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.

In the paper, Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film, arguing for a removal of the voyeurism encoded into film by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so, Mulvey argues, is by destroying the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest" Mulvey also asserts that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. For Mulvey, it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.

Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity in order to align herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.