Please Look Now: The Female Gaze in ‘Magic Mike XXL’

The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer.

The poster for 'Magic Mike XXL'. It's hard not to look...

 

“Are you ready to be worshipped? Are you ready to be exalted?”

 

Oh boy, are we!

 

Magic Mike XXL, this summer’s sequel to the surprise hit of 2012, Magic Mike, is a celebration of (heterosexual) female sexual desire. Centred on male stripping, Magic Mike XXL thoroughly recognises and foregrounds the pleasure of women within the film and within the audience; women are (finally) recognised as having sexual desire, and of gleefully and ravenously pursuing. In this piece, I will discuss how this celebration of heterosexual female desire creates a new space for the female gaze within cinema. Although exciting and radical, I will also flesh out why this conceptualisation is also difficult and slippery. However, ultimately, I suggest that truly productive message of Magic Mike XXL is in the way in which it creates a masculine image, a male spectacle, to be looked at, affording (heterosexual) women the privilege – and the permission – to look.

Magic Mike followed young and unemployed Adam (Alex Pettyfer) who enters the seedy world of male stripping after being introduced by Mike (Channing Tatum). Although the film contained many blatant strip scenes to be used for the audience’s entertainment, it also attempted to be something other than a gratuitous stripping movie. Directed by Academy Award-winning Steven Soderberg, the film was a Serious Picture, all washed-out colours, mumbled dialogue, and loose camera work. The sequel, however, offers a much more conventional (and sexually entertaining) story. We are reunited with Mike who, after leaving stripping to work full-time on his furniture business, is dissatisfied with his new lifestyle. He decides to rejoin his fellow strippers including Matt Bomer’s Ken and Joe Manganiello’s rather subtly named, Big Dick Richie for one last hurrah. After some quick and unimportant narrative exposition to explain the loss of Pettyfer and Matthew McConaughey (in the first film, he played club owner, Dallas), the boys hit the road to perform one last time at a stripping convention (yes, this is apparently a thing).

Channing Tatum is reunited with Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello in 'Magic Mike XXL'

More explicitly than its predecessor, Magic Mike XXL is aware of the sexual pleasures to be had from male stripping. The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer. The previous film may not have been an explicit piece of erotic entertainment, but, for this film, the marketers are clear that Magic Mike XXL is to be enjoyed, to be devoured and, most radically, to be looked at.

In Laura Mulvey’s famous account of the male gaze, she posits that, in traditional Hollywood cinema, men are the active bearers of the look whereas women are the passive objects of the look. She argues,

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female… 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.”

Positioning the audience’s look with that of the (traditionally male) protagonist, the internal and external male gaze constructs the sexualized and objectified image of woman. In this way, the female gaze is dismissed; female sexual desire and the act of female looking do not exist.

In traditional Hollywood cinema, the man is the possessor of the look whereas the woman is the object of the look

In traditional Hollywood cinema, the man is the possessor of the look whereas the woman is the object of the look

Considering the ways in which the female gaze is privileged in the film, Magic Mike XXL productively breaks down oppressive phallocentric structures within cinema. The men perform strip teases and erotic dances several times throughout the film both for the pleasure of the women in the film and for the women in the audience. Their final show is constructed under a flurry of excitement and anticipation, making the final release of their performance all the more satisfying. Most radically, women are actually depicted as in charge of their sexual desires and pleasures. The film introduces a new character, Rome, played brilliantly by Jada Pinkett-Smith. Rome owns a strip club where the majority if not all of the audience are Black women (side note: Has there been a mainstream film in recent years that so explicitly portrayed sexual desire within women who are not white? That alone is worth celebrating). Mike asks Rome to accompany them to the convention as their MC, and Rome commands the entirety of the performance. She calls the women in the audience queens and goddesses; she asks the audience what they want; she is effectively a Black woman in charge of white men. For the sexual pleasures it affords women, and for the autonomy it gives women over these pleasures, Magic Mike XXL offers a radical construction of the female gaze.

However, as much as we can praise Magic Mike XXL for this construction, the conceptualization of the female gaze problematically works within a heteronormative framework. Queer men and women as well as non-binary genders complicate this construction. Are women the only group of people afforded the space to look Magic Mike XXL? Interestingly, the trailer does not exclusively aim its erotic spectacle at women, creating instead a gender-neutral invitation to look at these men. However, the clips in the trailer and, indeed, scenes in the film, locate this primarily within the realm of heterosexual female desire. The people who attend the shows are women, the people who the men talk about entertaining are women, and the people who are invited to look are women. This is not to say that Magic Mike XXL isn’t aware of a possible homoerotic or even homosexual appeal. In one scene, the men attend a drag show where they also participate in a voguing competition. Developed out of queer African American communities in Harlem, the men’s voguing situates them within the framework of queer male spectacles. Also, as part of the film’s promotional campaign, the cast of Magic Mike XXL attended the 2015 LGBT pride parade in Los Angeles. The cynical may say they did so simply for the free publicity. But their willingness to embrace their sexualised roles in queer communities recognises a step forward in traditional ideas of masculinity, and a more fluid construction of the gaze.

The cast of 'Magic Mike XXL' at LGBT pride in LA

But let’s be clear. The film primarily operates in a heteronormative framework whereby heterosexual women desire the men. Perhaps we should turn our attention not to who is afforded the look, but how the look is set up in the first place. In cinema, men are not to be looked at. To do so risks being feminised or homoeroticised; both run the risk of emasculation that traditional conceptualizations of masculinity cannot handle. Yet, here, the men offer up their bodies as spectacle, as something to be looked at. Of course, the men don’t embody the level of objectification conventionally embodied by women. For one, their bodies – all pecs, arms and abs – display the traits of the traditionally successful masculine body. As Richard Dyer claims in his essay, “Don’t Look Now,” “Muscularity is the sign of power-natural, achieved, phallic.” It is this, then, that even as we look, reminds us that these men are not passive objects, but hard, active, and, most crucially, masculine. For another, this passivity also refuses to extend to the narrative. As Mulvey claims, when objectified in cinema, woman “tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” As the active protagonists on-screen and with key roles off-screen (the story is based on Tatum’s own life, and he has production roles in both movies), the men refuse to be simply passive objects of erotic contemplation.

But Magic Mike XXL is more subversive than it seems. Even as these seemingly traditional images of masculinity are renewed within the film, they are undercut by the free way in which the men offer their bodies as spectacle, as something to be looked at. As Tatum says in an interview, “We’re definitely trying to make [our stripping movie] a little different and a little bit less misogynistic. I’m not trying to get very meta about it all because at the end of the day, it’s just for fun.” And, ultimately, isn’t this what feminism is about? Sex is not sinful. When there’s mutual consent, enjoying it visually, aesthetically, and physically, is not sinful. Magic Mike XXL finally offers heterosexual women, if not anyone else, the space to enjoy this kind of sex and, if, as Tatum says, you can have fun while you’re at it, well, then that truly is a pleasure.

No, no, trust us boys, it's been our pleasure...

No, You Can’t Watch: The Queer Female Gaze on Screen

The desire to show a complex version of yourself seen with male characters in the Male Gaze, alongside a desire for a complex version of your partner seen with male recipients of desire in the Female Gaze, combines in the Queer Female Gaze to produce sexual and romantic relationships often rooted in friendship.


This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.


The Female Gaze, and scathing criticism of it, has come bursting into the world recently through Channing Tatum’s pecs. And not in an Aliens face-hugger way either (Magic Mike III anyone? No?). Magic Mike and its extra extra large sequel have been talked about as both a rare movie celebrating female sexuality, and as a prime example of feminist double standards. How can you complain about objectifying women’s bodies and then not criticise a film which seems to do the same to men? The whole debate was fascinating to me as a insider-outsider; sure I’m female, but I’m also a lesbian and so have very little interest in any part of Channing Tatum apart from his underrated comedic timing. I’ve talked before about the strange awkwardness of watching both Magic Mike films as a queer woman in the cinema (what are you doing with that spinning metal wheel of sparking fire, Mike? Do you want to burn your dick off? etc), so when this month’s Bitch Flicks theme was revealed to be the Female Gaze, I was ready and raring to go. But it turns out that the Female Gaze, and particularly the Queer Female Gaze, was a lot harder to pick through than I thought.

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But let’s start at the beginning. Although the Male Gaze was a term coined in the 1970s, it was just a concrete name for an age old phenomenon. The Male Gaze is two-fold:

  1. The sexual objectification of passive female characters.
  2. More generally the tendency to default to male protagonists, points of view, and stories.

The Gaze can be seen literally as a gaze, the way the camera interacts with the women it looks on, doing things like introducing female characters by trailing slowly up their bodies rather than establishing them with their face and actions. This differing treatment of men and women can be seen to be both informed by a patriarchal social structure, but also to reinforce it. Women can be on screen in a sexual situation, and not be subject to the Male Gaze, provided it is plot-relevant and that they are not only there to be a one-dimensional character purely put there for men’s pleasure. Alice Eve’s controversial underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness would be a perfect example of how, although she was not a one-dimensional character in the film as a whole, she was given a pointlessly objectifying scene which established nothing about her character, and seemed oddly out of place. The scene was also an example of how the sexualisation of women on screen, as opposed to men, is often used to reduce their power or respect in some way, either by playing into the “whore as worthless” idea, or by making them physically vulnerable as happened with Carol in the film.

CAROL-MARCUS

The Female Gaze, however, is a trickier subject, partly because its a newer phenomenon–as Transparents Jill Soloway said last year, “We’re essentially inventing the female gaze right now.” Both women’s stories and their sexuality are much less likely to be the focus of screen time historically. Definitions, classic camera angles, a checklist of what the Female Gaze might be, are hard to find when only 29 percent of current movies have female protagonists, and all women creative teams are rarer than panda sex. Is The Female Gaze always found in films made by women, for women, or about women? And does that gaze have the same definition as the Male Gaze with the genders switched? Perhaps not. Is it really true that women don’t objectify men? That they always view them as complete and whole human beings? The popularity of the Chippendales suggests otherwise. And our old friend Magic Mike is surely the obvious example of that female sexuality in action, proving women’s sexual desires make them see men as objects just as much as men do to women in films.

set_magic_mike_matt_bomer

However, when we look at the story of Magic Mike and his magic mic, the fact the main characters are strippers means the lack of clothes is plot dependant, and the films revolve around an exploration of the men’s interests, personalities, desires, and dreams. They are sexual, but they are also three-dimensional characters. Moreover, romantic comedies are always an example cited by critics of feminist film theory of movies which reduce men to merely a female fantasy. If that’s the truth, then women’s fantasies of men are a lot more full, positive, and respectful than men’s are of women. Men in romantic comedies aren’t just one-sided sexual beings; the appeal of them is hinged on their personal compatibility and often flawed realness as well. Hugh Grant made a career out of playing the soft-eyed Englishman, who bumbled along and stuttered over his words, hardly a paragon of sexual virility you might expect from the directly switched Male Gaze. Conversely, if women’s sexual pleasure and desire is depicted on screen, it is seen as much less acceptable than a man’s, particularly telling in the differences of age rating given to films that show male vs. female orgasms and oral sex.

If the Female Gaze is hard to pin down, then Queer Female Gaze is near impossible. What I mean specifically with that term is the Gaze we might be able to see in work produced for and about women who are attracted to women. Queer female characters in films made for and by end are almost always either packaged in the same sexually objectified way as straight women, or they are the butt of jokes as “ugly butch lesbians.” So although ostensibly it could be assumed the Queer Female Gaze would be identical or at least hugely similar to its male counterpart, in fact it cannot be mapped directly onto the Male Gaze for a few crucial reasons:

  1. The number of films made for, by and about queer women in mainstream cinema is embarrassingly small, and is not compatible to that male default I mentioned earlier.
  2. The sexual desires of queer women are different to that of straight men.
  3. The male ownership of female bodies is something tied to male behaviour rather than an intrinsic reaction to female bodies by anyone who desires them.
  4. Queer women are interested to see interesting women on film, meaning having women be solely sexual objects is not necessarily going to fly with us.

So maybe it’s something in-between, or something new entirely. Maybe, as I have come to believe over the last few weeks, it isn’t something which has a real definition or direction, simply because it doesn’t have a present or strong enough canonical tradition in media. Instead I’ve tried to look at current examples of media for and containing queer women, to see where it differs or intersects with the Male/Female Gazes.

As a queer woman it might seem to any men who are attracted to women, that I would love images of half naked oiled up women, because they do. But while they may just see the object of their desire, I have to also see myself. So when I see sexualised women on screen who are given no agency, plot or power, I don’t get anything positive from that. It feels unbelievably naive and worrying that someone who is for all intents and purposes a pliant sexual object could be genuinely and maturely desirable. This is the source of a long held observation in the queer world that “lesbian porn” is so obviously and inexplicable made for straight men. It also may be why I have never been able to come out to a male stranger who is trying to chat me up without him immediately asking for a threesome. I am infinitely more interested in women who are allowed to make decisions, tell their stories, control the narrative, in addition to being autonomous sexual beings, because that’s how I see myself, my friends, my partners.

Secondary issues that comes with the Male Gaze are problems like a lack of movies that show meaningful female friendship (as shown most simply through a quick look at how many films don’t pass the Bechdel Test; although films that pass don’t necessarily show female friendship, it’s pretty hard to find a film that fails the test that does). Shows with a focus on queer women, like Orange is the New Black or the web series Carmilla, also have a strong emphasis on female friendship alongside female sexual or romantic relationships. The desire to show a complex version of yourself seen with male characters in the Male Gaze, alongside a desire for a complex version of your partner seen with male recipients of desire in the Female Gaze, combines in the Queer Female Gaze to produce sexual and romantic relationships often rooted in friendship.

Screen-Shot-2014-10-13-at-11.29.40-am

This is furthered by the prevalence of narratives in queer cinema about coming out and finding community, which can give a tentative and holistic treatment to attraction. In the quintessential lesbian teen movie But, Im a Cheerleader, Graham and Megan begin as friends and develop parallel to Megan’s own acceptance of her sexuality. Their relationship is more than just sex, because it is so tied to her understanding of herself, in a way which values Graham far more than the Manic Pixie Dream Girls of the “young straight man finding himself through romance” narratives of the Male Gaze. The showing of intimate, dirty, casual or loving sex in any queer narrative does not remove the possibility of the women participating in this sex being fully imagined characters. The Gaze means female desire, both sexually and the desire to see herself present and whole on screen, and this is even more effective the more women you present for those queer female audience members to align themselves with.

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Women can be seen on screen as sexual beings, without being sexual objects. Queer women’s position as both gazer and gazee give a brilliant opportunity to reject the tired reduction of female characters in and out of the fictional sheets. What remains to be see, as we make the slow journey towards mainstream queer media, is whether the defaults of The Male Gaze, with its dehumanising camera shots and need for a male presence on screen, will bleed into the Queer Female Gaze through what we take for granted as “just how cinema is made.”

 


Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.

 

 

Summer Blockbusters Prove Women (Not Surprisingly) Enjoy Laughing and Gawking from Their Own Perspective

The Significance of Bridesmaids and Magic Mike in a Sea of Masculinity

Not this.


In Christopher Hitchens’s infamous essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” he points to a Stanford study that rated men and women’s reactions to cartoons on a “funniness” scale. The study found many similarities between men and women’s responses, but also found some marked differences. The author of the original report said, “Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon… So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.”

When people–especially an entire group of people–have low expectations, and don’t expect “reward” from their entertainment, certainly this is the set-up of a self-fulfilling prophecy, leaving women pegged as unfunny, unable to get jokes, and generally un-stimulated by what the normal audience (men) is stimulated by. Hollywood has been working under that framework for too long, and women have learned to expect that men’s stories are the norm, and women’s stories are just for women.

However, two summer blockbusters–Bridesmaids in 2011 and Magic Mike in 2012–have proven that when women are rewarded, they are indeed pleased. 

While one can easily find wider representation in art house movie theaters, commercial, blockbuster films for the masses have long been entrenched in a sexist Hollywood boys’ club. While these commercial films had flaws, the audience support and huge profits should teach Hollywood a lesson about what women want.


Bridesmaids broke the mold of the R-rated comedy genre by being about women and from a woman’s point of view. While raunchy, raucous comedies about men and men’s stories have been dominating the big screen for years, a modern counterpart with a female protagonist was an anomaly until Bridesmaids. Judd Apatow, baron of bromance, asked Kristen Wiig for script ideas, and she and her writing partner Annie Mumolo created Bridesmaids, and Apatow produced it.

Bridesmaids featured a female protagonist and told a uniquely female story, while still attracting and entertaining male audiences.


Before the film was released, many were pushing going to see it on opening weekend as a “social responsibility,” as box-office activists knew that the numbers had to be there for studio executives to trust that a blockbuster from a woman’s point of view can work and be profitable. And it was. Bridesmaids went on to become Apatow’s highest-grossing film, and the top R-rated female comedy ever.

Within weeks, female comedy was said to have made a “comeback,” and there was already talk of a sequel. Certainly money talks, but audiences–men and women–genuinely found the film hilarious and engaging.

Kristen Wiig co-wrote the film.

Melissa Silverstein, in her piece “Why Bridesmaids Matters,” noted the high stakes of the film. In an interview after the film was a solid success, Silverstein said, when asked what the “promised land” might look like after Bridesmaids’ success, “We have been in the desert for so long that we don’t even know what the promised land looks like. Women have been so beaten down that they are happy with one success and are looking to build from there… If women could figure out how to band together and make more films a success, maybe the promised land will be in view sooner rather than later.”

Female audiences were desperate for this kind of a film. As the campaigns for opening-weekend attendance showed, the expectations weren’t even that high, but the fight for more female comedies lured audiences in. The fact that it was entertaining was a plus.

A little over a year later, (heterosexual) women flocked to their local theaters in droves to see what they hoped would be naked, grinding, gyrating men on the big screen. But wait–just as women aren’t supposed to be funny, they certainly aren’t supposed to flaunt sexual desire (and women aren’t visually stimulated, right?). Wrong again. Steven Soderbergh built it, and women came.

Magic Mike proved the female gaze is alive and well.


The marketing leading up to the film’s release didn’t always focus on drawing in women with butts and thrusts. Up until a few weeks before the release, the trailer was selling a familiar rom-com. Then came the international and red band trailers, which left the internet buzzing with anticipation for the film.

In its first weekend, the film made seven times its production budget, and women-dominated audiences crowded theaters. In what, anecdotally, is a perfect description of the audience, Dodai Stewart wrote at Jezebel that “they were positively giddy about seeing some naked dudes.”

The most common complaint by women about the film is that there was too much story. They wanted more stripping. What was that about what women want?

Many audience members were disappointed that there wasn’t more stripping.

Just as there was a collective outburst of laughter last summer, this summer brought audiences to a collective climax, proving to Hollywood that women aren’t just in the game to watch The Notebook or accompany their boyfriends to see Transformers. Women as audiences have agency and want women’s stories and men’s bodies just as much as men want men’s stories and women’s bodies. For too long, women have had to settle for what men want (or are presumed to want). 

In a recent conversation in The New York Times, critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis bring up the success of the two films. Scott says to Dargis: 
“You note that Magic Mike owes much of its box office potency to its popularity with women. As you suggested in your review it’s a ‘woman’s picture’ in two potentially radical ways. It caters to the kind of visual pleasure — the delight in ogling beautiful bodies in motion — that film theorists have long associated with the male gaze. And it tells what would have been, in an earlier era, the story of a woman, a good-hearted, hard-working striver selling sex appeal, pursuing dreams and looking for true love in difficult circumstances. The stuff of classic melodrama but with a hard-bodied hero in place of the softhearted heroine… Last summer the power of the female audience — and also perhaps the renewed willingness of male moviegoers to seek out stories about women — was demonstrated by the success of Bridesmaids… But something feels different about this year, and it may just be that such movies feel less anomalous, less like out-riders in a male-dominated entertainment universe. The ground may have shifted a little.”

Dargis answers, “Only if there’s enough money… The successes are promising, but I am going to wait until the numbers improve before I celebrate.”

As Dargis notes, we must not celebrate too quickly. Are these films perfect specimens of feminist film? Of course not. Both are entirely heteronormative. Bridesmaids‘ gross-out scenes felt clunky and out of sync (Apatow “retooled” some of Wiig/Mumolo’s script in places), and it didn’t pass the Bechdel test with flying colors.  The first nudity the audience sees in Magic Mike are Olivia Munn’s breasts (this male blogger, giving straight men reasons to go see it, includes all of the female nudity and the fact that it’s told from a man’s perspective). Magic Mike is largely told from a male gaze (men created and filmed it); it’s simply that the female gaze pushed and forced itself into the room. It also relies on the tired story line that women just want to save or fix men.

But for now, the promised land looks a little closer. Perhaps the success of these films is a mirage in the desert, but we can hope that a new age of blockbuster films awaits us–one where women’s stories are told as simply stories, and women’s sexuality is celebrated. For too long, women have been cast aside as objects, as accessories. They are ready to be the subjects. If ticket sales mean anything, which we know they do, Hollywood should take note.


Leigh Kolb is an instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. She teaches composition, literature, and journalism courses. While working on her MFA in creative nonfiction writing, Leigh was the editor of a small-town newspaper. In her academic and professional life, she’s always gravitated toward the history and literature of the oppressed, and wants to see their stories properly inserted into our cultural dialogue. She believes that critically analyzing popular media is an important step in opening those conversations. Leigh lives on a small farm with her husband, dogs, cat and flock of chickens.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Stephanie‘s Picks:

Must We Worry About the Boys of ‘Brave’? by KJ Dell’antonia via the New York Times

Why I Heart GIRLS & Lena Dunham’s Body via Virginia Sole-Smith

TV Trailer Watch: Steel Magnolias via Women and Hollywood

Nora Ephron, Prolific Author and Screenwriter, Dies at Age 71 by Adam Bernstein via the Washington Post

Image Based Harassment and Visual Misogyny by Anita Sarkeesian via Feminist Frequency

Helen Mirren Calls for More Female Film-makers by Ben Child via the Guardian

Megan‘s Picks:

The Fight Against Misogyny in Gaming Enlists Some Big Names by Katie JM Baker via Jezebel

Cross-Post: Oscar Flashback: Nora Ephron: by Sasha Stone via Women and Hollywood

Magic Mike: Old Sexism in a New Package by Carole Heldman via Sociological Images

Girl Power: What Happens When Thousands of Teen Girls Ask Seventeen to Stop Selling Them Out by Kaye Toal via UpWorthy

‘Love & Hip-Hop Atlanta’ Shouldn’t Embarrass Black and Brown Women by Akiba Solomon via ColorLines

Thank God Rachel Maddow Is Depressed by Lynn Beisner via Role/Reboot

Feminist with a Funny Bone by Michele Kort via Ms. Magazine Blog

Seventeen Magazine’s New Photoshop Policy Is the Same as The Old Photoshop Policy by Jenna Sauers via Jezebel

Louis C.K. Bucks Casting Trends with Susan Kelechi Watson by Latoya Peterson via Racialicious

‘Strong Female Protagonist’ Takes on Superhero Comics — and Occupy Wall Street by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

Amy Poehler Interviews Tiny Feminists, Inspires Us by Alanna Bennett via The Mary Sue 

Memo to Hollywood: Women Go to the Movies Too by Melissa Silverstein via The Washington Post