The phrase "male gaze" has become common cultural shorthand, but its meaning is often flattened into "men looking at women." In film theory, the masculine gaze is more specific: it's a visual system that positions the viewer to see women as objects of desire, props for a hero's journey, or beautiful problems waiting to be solved. It's about power, not eyeballs. And that power quietly shapes how audiences learn to interpret women's bodies, emotions, and choices.
The feminine gaze, by contrast, isn't just a gender-swapped view from the other side of the camera. It's a relational way of seeing—one that favors inner life, emotional reciprocity, and authenticity over possession. Where the masculine gaze often demands control, the feminine gaze favors connection. It isn't about making the viewer want the subject; it's about making the viewer understand the subject. It treats characters as agents, not ornaments.
Historically, the masculine gaze dominated because men controlled most storytelling mediums: film studios, photography, advertising, and even literary canon formation. As such, audiences were trained to see desire as inherently male, femininity something to be positioned, posed, and consumed. This is why, to this day, a woman wiping away tears in soft light often reads as "beautiful tragedy" rather than "complex person having a complex reaction."
The feminine gaze disrupts that dynamic by refusing to flatten experience. In practice, this means camera angles that hold space instead of slicing bodies into parts, that linger not on the perfect contour of a hip but on the subtle flicker of a thought crossing someone's face. It often means depicting intimacy—romantic or otherwise—as something co-created rather than taken. It is a mode that has been championed by women-directors like Céline Sciamma, Lulu Wang, Greta Gerwig, and Chloé Zhao. It offers interiority to the viewer rather than spectacle.
Yet the feminine gaze isn't strictly tied to the creator's gender. Men can use it, and women can replicate the masculine gaze. The gaze is a framework, not a chromosome. Some male directors—Barry Jenkins, Hirokazu Kore-eda—have built careers on tenderness, vulnerability, and relational seeing. Likewise, some female directors adopt the masculine gaze intentionally to expose, critique, or reclaim it. The gaze is less about who's holding the camera and more about who's being invited to hold the story.
A particularly powerful difference between the two gazes lies in the emotional contract with the audience. Whereas the masculine gaze asks viewers to desire or judge the subject, the feminine gaze asks viewers to empathize with her. One gaze centers the viewer's wants. The other centers the character's humanity. For many women viewers—especially those accustomed to shrinking themselves to fit someone else's frame—the feminine gaze feels like a door cracking open into a room where they can breathe.
This shift also has cultural consequences. As media moves toward embracing the feminine gaze, audiences—of all genders—get to see women as protagonists of their own emotional landscapes, rather than as mirrors for men's ambitions. It widens the spectrum on what femininity can look like: assertive without being punished, vulnerable without being fetishized, complex without being "too much." It makes room for women to exist outside of the narrow visual grammar that has conventionally defined them.
Let's not forget, though, that there's a risk in romanticizing the feminine gaze as inherently soft or warm. Women can be sharp, wild, abrasive, messy, morally ambiguous—and the feminine gaze embraces that entire emotional palette. It doesn't idealize women; it bears witness to them. It reclaims storytelling in the name of rich, layered, unapologetic female subjectivity.
Ultimately, the difference between the masculine and feminine gazes isn't a binary as much as it is a shift in cinematic gravity. One gaze measures a woman's value by how she is seen. The other measures it by how she feels. And in that distinction lies the power to reshape not only our media, but also the cultural imagination that decides whose stories matter and why.