female gaze

There’s something oddly dystopian about watching a group of men argue with women about what women are attracted to. It’s like watching someone confidently explain your own diary back to you, incorrectly. And yet, this is where we find ourselves: in a culture that purports to celebrate women’s empowerment, while simultaneously refusing to believe them when they express desire, attraction, or even ambivalence on their own terms. Why?

The basic question of male attractiveness sets the internet ablaze. Men overwhelmingly prefer the chiselled, gym-forged version. Women, on the other hand, expressed a preference for the softer, more natural physic. Then comes the real twist: men call women liars.

That should tell us something. This wasn’t just disagreement. It was an accusation: “You can’t really want what you say you want. You must want what I think you should want.” The subtext isn’t hard to read: the female gaze—what women actually find beautiful, compelling, desirable—is less real, less reliable, and less culturally valid than the male version of female desire.

The probelm isn’t the gaze, it’s who gets to have one.

Let’s rewind. In cinema studies, Laura Mulvey popularised the idea of the “male gaze”, which is the way visual media frames women as passive objects to be looked at, often through a lens of heterosexual male desire. But what’s rarely discussed is what happens when women look back.

Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, argued that gender is not an internal truth but a performed identity. If femininity is performed for a male gaze, then rejecting that gaze is a kind of existential revolt. The female gaze, when voiced, threatens the whole theatre. It says: I see differently. I want differently. I am not the image on your screen—I’m the subject behind the camera.

And that’s dangerous. Not because it’s violent, but because it undermines a whole structure of meaning.

Long before Butler, Sophie de Grouchy wrote on sympathy and moral perception. Her concern wasn’t just ethics in the abstract, it was the politics of who is seen as fully human. Sympathy, for her, is the basis of moral life. But sympathy is only possible when we actually see and hear each other.

When men call women liars about their own preferences, they’re denying recognition. They’re saying, “You don’t really know what you want. Let us decide that for you.” It’s a failure of sympathy, not just politeness. It’s epistemic injustice, the erasure of a person’s credibility as a knower of their own experience.

This isn’t confined to attractiveness. It extends to work, ambition, vulnerability, and even anger. A woman says she doesn’t like the ripped body, and she’s told she’s being dishonest. A woman says she wants autonomy, and she’s told she’s cold or unfeminine. Culture seems to ask women to speak and then punish them for not speaking in the way the dominant culture wants them to.

Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, described how women are raised to internalise the gaze of men to see themselves as the “Other.” Woman becomes the mirror, the supporting role, the reflection. When the female gaze surfaces, it’s often dismissed as misinformed, silly, or vain.

The male body, once a relatively unremarkable vessel, is now a site of hyper-surveillance. But not by women, by men. The gym-hardened figure isn’t necessarily what women are clamouring for. It’s what men think they need to become to win male-coded admiration, in communities where vulnerability is taboo and desire is something you manufacture through effort, not intimacy.

Women, meanwhile, are saying: We don’t want the marble statue. We want the man who can listen, laugh, make mistakes, and still show up. But that doesn’t sell mens magazines or influencer courses on becoming a high-status hustler.

There’s no single answer to this. That’s the point. Desire isn’t a spreadsheet. But when women express attraction, ambivalence, disgust, or joy and are ignored, something bigger is at play. A system doesn’t change just because you give it a new paint job. Patriarchy can dress up in “body positivity,” “empowerment,” or “diversity hiring” but it still shows its teeth when we encouter these moments of fracture.

To centre the female gaze isn’t to reverse the hierarchy. It’s to reject the hierarchy altogether. It’s to recognise that desire isn’t a game of obedience, but a field of relation, it’s messy, mutual, embodied, and political.

So what happens if we take the female gaze seriously? Not just as a counterpoint to the male gaze, but as a legitimate perspective with the same right to shape culture, beauty, and meaning?

Perhaps we end up with more questions than answers. But at least we’re asking the right ones and genuinely engaging in a conversation with one another. What if the real revolution isn’t who’s looking, but whether anyone is listening?