Voyuerism - Laura Mulvey

Goodwin stated that woman in music videos are objectified as they are put in small amount of clothing and are used to attract attention from a male audience. Another theorist, Laura Mulvey, supported this theory by writing about 'scopophlia'. Scopophlia is the pleasure gained from looking or watching something or someone and in this case it would be gained by watching a music video. A video that supports this theory is Rihanna's "Stay". She spends the entire video presumably naked inside a bath and although everything is covered it is still provoking a male audience into watching a song that actually has a lot of meaning behind it.

 



In my opinion I think that the song is very moving and the video could have gone many other ways in terms of narrative yet Rihanna interestingly choose this style, which I think only provides emotion rather than the story that the song is expressing. This particular style does not suit me, likely because I am female, yet a male audience may enjoy this due to the voyeurism in the video. This is not to say that females cannot enjoy the video but I personally think that there could have been a strong narrative used in this video but this style was chosen, possibly to gain a male audience. This supports what Mulvey expressed as the camera can be considered as the 'male gaze' as Rihanna is always in the centre frame and is clearly seen to be undressing.

 

In contrast to Mulvey's theory, the male body can also be displayed in videos to attract female attention. Typically if both a female and male character are present the female character will take the role of reacting to the male body and how much of it is showing. However a video where the entirety of it is just the male body is Panic! At The Disco's "Girl/Girl/Boy". All the three minute video shows is the main singer with no clothes on lip-syncing and spinning, but similar to Rihanna's video nothing is shown yet it is still clear what the video is suggesting.

 

 

There is no narrative for this video, yet a small outline of the song is about sexuality which is why he is likely 'naked' and just like the 'male gaze' this video likely attracted just as many women as Rihanna's attracted men. Similar to Rihanna's video this video could have had an interesting plot yet this was the chosen theme for the video and in some ways it makes sense as the song is linked to sexuality yet so much more could have been done.

 

Something interesting I noticed about each video was the comments left on YouTube video. On Rihanna's video people commented about how meaningful the song was and how it had helped them through tough times in their life however Panic! At The Disco's video comments were all about the amount of clothing, which was none, the singer was wearing. Most of these accounts had a female name or icon and were commenting on how attractive the singer was. A drastic difference. I did not find a single comment on Rihanna's video about the amount of clothing she had as the song is what stood out to that particular audience, who also happened to be female. This could have been because males are less likely to comment on this particular kind of content but it was interesting to see the difference.

Overall Mulvey's theory applies very well to these two videos as it attracted the opposite gender to the video, however from what the comments suggested more females were attracted to the male body which is the opposite of a majority of the both Goodwin and Mulvey's voyeurism theory.